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dork

nounverbnounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//dɔːk//
  • Canada//doɹk//
  • Australia//doːk//

A quirky, silly or stupid, socially inept person, or one who is out of touch with contemporary trends and typically has unfashionable hobbies. (Overlaps conceptually with nerd and geek, but does not imply the same level of intelligence.)

noun

  1. 1

    slangA quirky, silly or stupid, socially inept person, or one who is out of touch with contemporary trends and typically has unfashionable hobbies. (Overlaps conceptually with nerd and geek, but does not imply the same level of intelligence.)

    I entitled the piece "Dorky", dork being slang for a person who does not belong to popular groups, usually an outsider, an odd person, sometimes inept, other times cranky.

    I didn’t have any clothes and I had short hair and looked like a dork. Girls wouldn’t go out with me.

  2. 2

    slangThe penis.

    As a matter of fact, this slob was full of information today. He told me why we Jews have different dorks.

    "You’re dead, Trashmouth," Vince “Boogers” Taliendo told him, pulling his jock up over a dork roughly the size and shape of an anemic peanut.

    "There's that dork whose wife cut off his dork." And when people ask him for an autograph he writes, "Best of luck to Betsy. Signed, the guy whose wife cut off his penis."

Etymology

First use appears in the US c. 1961. The sense of a "silly person" is presumably from earlier use as a bowdlerization of dick (“penis”) in student slang, particularly the Midwest. Despite a common misconception, it has never referred specifically to a whale's penis, but penises in general. Alternative etymology derives from dialectal Norwegian dorg (“a mass; heap; a heavy, dimwitted, slovenly person”).

verb

  1. 1

    slangTo act or behave in the manner of a dork.

  2. 2

    slangTo act or behave in an awkward or clumsy manner.

    I spent all weekend dorking with the router settings with no luck, though I could get any one out of my 5 PCs on the net when connected directly to the modem.

noun

  1. 1

    Variant of dirkarchaicAlternative form of dirk (“a long dagger”).

Etymology

Uncertain; apparently from Scots. See dirk.

Forms

plural
dorks
past tense
dorked
past participle
dorked
present participle
dorking
third person singular
dorks
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).