Irk

//ɜːk// name, noun, verb

name, noun, verb ·Moderate ·High school level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    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."

Verb
  1. 1
    to irritate; annoy; bother transitive

    "It irks me doing all this work and have someone wreck it."

  2. 2
    irritate or vex wordnet
Proper Noun
  1. 1
    A river in Greater Manchester, England, which joins the River Irwell in Manchester city centre.

Synonyms

All synonyms
annoygallabradeafflictaggravateail

Example

More examples

"It was a pleasure to meet you Stella, I am so sorry for whatever I said to irk you the wrong way."

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.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.