cark

• IPA^(key): /kɑː(ɹ)k/

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• Rhymes: -ɑː(ɹ)k

From Middle English carken, also charken (“to be anxious, worry; to load (sth.); to bear (crops)”), from Anglo-Norman charger (“to load; to burden; to harass, worry; to calculate, estimate (quantities); to charge, call to account; to charge, command; to instruct; to entrust, to allege, plead; to attach importance to”) (also chargere, chargier, chargir; charcher, charchier; carger, cargier, cargir; carker, carkere; karker; jarger).[1] Compare Old French chargier (“to load”).[2]

cark (third-person singular simple present carks, present participle carking, simple past and past participle carked)

1. (obsolete, intransitive) To be filled with worry, solicitude, or troubles.
2. (obsolete, transitive, intransitive) To bring worry, vexation, or anxiety.
   • 1831, Adam Clarke, Commentary on the Bible, Comment on 2 Timothy 2: 22:

     Carnal pleasures are the sins of youth: ambition and the love of power, the sins of middle age: covetousness and carking cares, the crimes of old age.

   • 1902, William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lecture 3:

     [W]e shall see how in morbid melancholy this sense of the unreality of things may become a carking pain, and even lead to suicide.

   • 1913, Mrs. [Marie] Belloc Lowndes, chapter I, in The Lodger, London: Methuen, OCLC 7780546; republished in Novels of Mystery: The Lodger; The Story of Ivy; What Really Happened, New York, N.Y.: Longmans, Green and Co., […], [1933], OCLC 2666860, page 0056:

     Thanks to that penny he had just spent so recklessly [on a newspaper] he would pass a happy hour, taken, for once, out of his anxious, despondent, miserable self. It irritated him shrewdly to know that these moments of respite from carking care would not be shared with his poor wife, with careworn, troubled Ellen.

3. (intransitive) To labor anxiously.
   • 1849, Charles Kingsley,"Alton Locke's Song":

     Why for sluggards cark and moil?

cark (plural carks)

1. (obsolete) A noxious or corroding worry.
   • 1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book I, Canto I”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, OCLC 960102938, stanza 44:

     His heauie head, deuoide of carefull carke, / Whose sences all were straight benumbd and starke.

   • 1832, William Motherwell, They Come! The Merry Summer Months

     Fling cark and care aside.

   • 1887, R. D. Blackmore, Springhaven

     Freedom from the cares of money and the cark of fashion.

2. (obsolete) The state of being filled with worry.

• → Welsh: carc

From caulk.

cark (third-person singular simple present carks, present participle carking, simple past and past participle carked)

1. Pronunciation spelling of caulk.

cark

1. See cark it.

• cark in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913

• RACK, rack

From Middle English carken. See cark above.

• (Southern Scots) IPA^(key): /ˈkɑrk/

cark (plural carks)

1. (archaic) worry, anxiety

cark (third-person singular simple present carks, present participle carkin, simple past carkt, past participle carkt)

1. (archaic) To worry or be anxious.