''lark'' ▫ᴱᴺ Entries

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''lark'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20250815011913-00-⌔

lark - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

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Noun

lark (plural larks)

• Any of various small, singing passerine birds of the family Alaudidae.
• Any of various similar-appearing birds, but usually ground-living, such as the meadowlark and titlark.
• (by extension) One who wakes early; one who is up with the larks.
  • ✤ Synonyms: early bird, early riser
  • ✤ Antonym: owl
• A jolly or peppy person.
  • ✤ Charles Randolph Grean is married to pop lark and multi-hit artist Betty Johnson.¹

Verb

lark (third-person singular simple present larks, present participle larking, simple past and past participle larked)

• (intransitive) To catch larks (a type of bird).
  • ✤ *to go larking *

Noun

lark (plural larks)

• A frolic or romp, some fun.
  • ✤ ‘Ha! ha!’ laughed Master Bates, ‘what a lark that would be, wouldn’t it, Fagin? I say, how the Artful would bother ’em wouldn’t he?’²
  • ✤ “Oh, dear, no,” said the young Englishman; “my cousin was coming over on some business, so I just came across, at an hour’s notice, for the lark.”³
  • ✤ Thanks partly to Tom Wolfe’s raised-eyebrow account, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” that bohemian lark has been retrospectively hailed as the flash point of the emerging hippie counterculture.⁴
  • ✤ What began as a lark has grown into something very, very big, inflating the company’s ambitions.⁵
• A prank.
  • ✤ doolittle. […] [T]hanks to your silly joking, he leaves me a share in his Pre-digested Cheese Trust worth three thousand a year on condition that I lecture for his Wannafeller Moral Reform World League as often as they ask me up to six times a year./higgins. The devil he does! Whew! [Brightening suddenly] What a lark!⁶

Verb

lark (third-person singular simple present larks, present participle larking, simple past and past participle larked)

• To sport, engage in harmless pranking.
  • ✤ [T]hey laugh at us old boys,” thought old Pendennis. And he was not far wrong; the times and manners which he admired were pretty nearly gone—the gay young men “larked” him irreverently […]⁷
  • ✤ […] the porter at the rail-road had seen a scuffle; or when he found it was likely to bring him in as a witness, then it might not have been a scuffle, only a little larking […]⁸
• To frolic, engage in carefree adventure.

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) enPR: läk, IPA: /lɑːk/
  • Audio (Southern England): 🔊
• (General American) enPR: lärk, IPA: /lɑɹk/
  • Audio (US): 🔊
• Rhymes: -ɑː(ɹ)k
• (non-rhotic) Homophones: lakh (one pronunciation); lawk (cot–caught merger); lock, Locke (father-bother merger)

Etymology 1

From Middle English larke, laverke, from Old English lāwerce, lǣwerce, lāuricæ, from Proto-West Germanic ﹡laiwaʀikā, from Proto-Germanic ﹡laiwazikǭ (compare dialectal West Frisian larts, Dutch leeuwerik, German Lerche), from ﹡laiwaz (borrowed into Finnish leivo, Estonian lõo), of unknown ultimate origin with no definitive cognates outside of Germanic.

Etymology 2

Uncertain, either

• from a northern English dialectal term lake/laik (“to play”) (around 1300, from Old Norse leika (“to play (as opposed to work)”)), with an intrusive -r- as is common in southern British dialects; or
• a shortening of skylark (1809), sailors’ slang, “play roughly in the rigging of a ship”, because the common European larks were proverbial for high-flying; Dutch has a similar idea in speelvogel (“playbird, a person of markedly playful nature”).

Printed 2026-06-28.

(echo:: @ ⌗)

Footnotes

1. 1990, Wayne Jancik, The Billboard Book of One-Hit Wonders, →ISBN, page 238: ↩

2. 1838, Boz [pseudonym; Charles Dickens], chapter 43, in Oliver Twist; […], volume, London: Richard Bentley, […], →OCLC: ↩

3. 1878, Henry James, An International Episode ‎${}^{[1]}$: ↩

4. 2011 August 4, Stephen Holden, “Stoned Archive: Wild Ride Of the Merry Pranksters”, in The New York Times ‎${}^{[2]}$, →ISSN: ↩

5. 2018 November, Alexis C. Madrigal, “The Dangers of YouTube for Young Children”, in The Atlantic ‎${}^{[3]}$: ↩

6. 1912 (date written), [George] Bernard Shaw, “Pygmalion”, in Androcles and the Lion, Overruled, Pygmalion, London: Constable and Company, published 1916, →OCLC, Act V, page 173: ↩

7. 1848 November – 1850 December, William Makepeace Thackeray, chapter 68, in The History of Pendennis. […], volume, London: Bradbury and Evans, […], published 1849–1850, →OCLC: ↩

8. 1855, Elizabeth Gaskell, chapter 35, in North and South ‎${}^{[4]}$: ↩

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