Awkward

How to spell awkward

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce awkward

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does awkward mean?

1. adjectiveCausing or feeling embarrassment, difficulty or discomfort, or lacking grace and ease.

Awkward in a sentence

• There was an awkward silence after she forgot his name.

• The new chair was an awkward shape that would not fit through the door.

Where does awkward come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

The word grew from an old adjective 'awk', which English took from the Old Norse 'afugr' (also spelled 'ǫfugr'), meaning 'turned the wrong way', 'backwards' or 'wrong-handed'. To this root was added the native English suffix '-ward', which marks direction, as in 'forward' and 'backward', so the literal idea was 'directed the wrong way'. It appears in late Middle English around the 1300s, first describing things that were clumsy, badly aimed or back to front, and only later did it broaden to cover the social sense of an embarrassing or uncomfortable situation. The dropped sense of 'awk' on its own faded out, leaving 'awkward' as the surviving descendant of that lost word. The unusual 'wkw' cluster, which has no vowel between the two w-sounds, is the real spelling trap, and it survives precisely because the word fused a Norse stem onto an English ending.

How the word is built

• awk- (from Old Norse afugr: turned the wrong way)
• -ward (suffix meaning 'in the direction of')