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meek

adjectiveverbattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//miːk//
  • United States//mik//

Humble, non-boastful, modest, meager, or self-effacing.

adjective

  1. 1

    Humble, non-boastful, modest, meager, or self-effacing.

    Blessed are the meeke: for they shall inherit the earth.

    Mrs. Wickam was a meek woman...who was always ready to pity herself, or to be pitied, or to pity anybody else...

  2. 2

    Submissive, dispirited, cowed.

    What if they were wolves instead of lambs? They'd eat her all the sooner if she was meek to them. Fight or be eaten.

Etymology

From Middle English meek, meke, meoc, probably a borrowing from Old Norse mjúkr (“soft; meek”), from Proto-Germanic *meukaz, *mūkaz (“soft; supple”), from Proto-Indo-European *mewg-, *mewk- (“slick, slippery; to slip”); compare Old English smēag (“subtle, stealthy, etc.”) and smūgan. Cognate with Swedish and Norwegian Nynorsk mjuk (“soft”), Norwegian Bokmål myk (“soft”), and Danish myg (“supple”), Dutch muik (“soft, overripe”), dialectal German mauch (“dry and decayed, rotten”), Mauche (“malanders”). Compare as well Welsh mwyth (“soft, weak”), Latin ēmungō (“to blow one's nose”), Tocharian A muk- (“to let go, give up”), Lithuanian mùkti (“to slip away from”), Ancient Greek μύσσομαι (mússomai, “to blow the nose”), Sanskrit मु॒ञ्चति॑ (muñcáti, “to release, let loose”).

verb

  1. 1

    To tame; to break (a horse)

Forms

comparative
meeker
superlative
meekest
past tense
meeked
past participle
meeked
present participle
meeking
third person singular
meeks
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).