Dork

How to spell dork

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce dork

What does dork mean?

1. nounA socially awkward, clumsy, or foolish person, usually said in a mild or affectionate way.

Dork in a sentence

• He felt like a complete dork after tripping in front of the whole office.

• She called her little brother a lovable dork for wearing socks with sandals.

Where does dork come from?

Language of origin: Other

Dork is a piece of American student slang that surfaced in print only in the 1960s, though it had probably circulated in spoken speech a little earlier. The most widely accepted account is that it began as a coarse slang word for the male organ, in the same vein as 'dick', and was then softened into a mild insult meaning a foolish or socially awkward person. Some etymologists suspect it is simply an altered or blended form of 'dick' or 'dirk', but no single origin can be proved, so the trail genuinely runs cold. By the 1970s and 1980s it had lost most of its earlier crudeness and settled into the affectionate, teasing sense familiar today, often applied to someone clumsy, uncool, or endearingly nerdy. The spelling is wholly phonetic, which makes it easy to write, and its short, blunt sound is part of why it caught on so quickly in casual American English.

How the word is built

• dork (single root; origin uncertain, possibly an altered form of an earlier slang term)