irk

Valid in Scrabble

Scrabble points: 7
Words With Friends: 7
Letters: 3

Pronunciation

/ɜːk/

See all 2 pronunciations

/ɜːk/ · /ɝk/

Definition of irk

3 senses · 3 parts of speech · etymology included

verb

(transitive)to irritate; annoy; bother

“It irks me doing all this work and have someone wreck it.”
“Let no man pray to Māna-Yood-Sushāī, for who shall trouble Māna with mortal woes or irk him with the sorrows of all the houses of Earth?”

See all 3 definitions

verb

(transitive)to irritate; annoy; bother

“It irks me doing all this work and have someone wreck it.”
“Let no man pray to Māna-Yood-Sushāī, for who shall trouble Māna with mortal woes or irk him with the sorrows of all the houses of Earth?”

noun

An annoyance.

“The trade-off between computation cost and precision results in tuning parameters […] being exposed to the user, a major irk to practitioners of data science.”

name

A river in Greater Manchester, England, which joins the River Irwell in Manchester city centre.

Definitions from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA.

Etymology

Inherited from Middle English irken (“to tire, grow weary”), from Old Norse yrkja (“to work”), from Proto-Germanic *wurkijaną (“to work”), from Proto-Indo-European *werǵ- (“to work”). Cognate with Icelandic yrkja (“to compose”), Swedish yrka (“to urge, argue”), Old English wyrċan (“to work”). Doublet of work.