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Allin

hark

verbnounattested in dialogue

  • //hɑː(ɹ)k//

A whisper

verb

  1. 1

    archaicTo listen attentively.

    But harke, I heare the footing of a man.

    Hark! the herald angels sing / Glory to the new born King

    "Hark! The thunder becomes less muttering. It is nearing us, and nearing the earth, too. Hark! One crammed crash! All the vibrations made one by nearness. Another flash. Hold."

    Loud voices and a renewed uproar were raised in front of the boarding-house[…] "'Tis Missis Murphy's voice," said Mrs. McCaskey, harking.

Etymology

From Middle English herken, herkien, from Old English *hercian, *heorcian, *hiercian, from Proto-West Germanic *hauʀikōn, *hauʀukōn, derived ultimately from Proto-Germanic *hauzijaną (“to hear”) + formative/intensive -k (see also the related hīeran, whence English hear). Equivalent to hear + -k. Cognate with Scots herk (“to hark”), North Frisian harke (“to hark”), West Frisian harkje (“to listen”), obsolete Dutch horken (“to hark, listen to”), Middle Low German horken (“to hark”), German horchen (“to hark, harken to”).

noun

  1. 1

    A whisper

Forms

plural
harks
past tense
harked
past participle
harked
present participle
harking
third person singular
harks
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).