Meek
adj, name, verb ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
- 1 To tame; to break (a horse) US
- 1 Humble, non-boastful, modest, meager, or self-effacing.
"Blessed are the meeke: for they shall inherit the earth."
- 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."
- 1 evidencing little spirit or courage; overly submissive or compliant wordnet
- 2 humble in spirit or manner; suggesting retiring mildness or even cowed submissiveness wordnet
- 3 very docile wordnet
- 1 A surname.
- 2 An unincorporated community in Holt County, Nebraska, United States.
Antonyms
All antonymsExample
More examples"There's more to her than you think. She may seem pretty meek on first glance, but I get the sense she can get things done when she needs to."
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”), Proto-Slavic *mękъkъ (“soft”), Ancient Greek μύσσομαι (mússomai, “to blow the nose”), Sanskrit मुञ्चति (muñcati, “to release, let loose”).
Related phrases
More for "meek"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.