Lark

How to spell lark

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce lark

What does lark mean?

1. nounA small brown songbird known for singing while flying high above open ground.
2. nounA bit of harmless fun, mischief, or adventure done for amusement.

Lark in a sentence

• A lark rose from the meadow and sang far above the field.

• They booked the spontaneous weekend trip purely as a lark.

• The farmer was up with the lark to begin the harvest.

• Painting the office door bright orange was just a harmless lark.

Where does lark come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The bird name comes from Old English lāwerce or lāferce, a word with relatives across the Germanic languages such as Dutch leeuwerik and German Lerche, all naming the small ground-nesting songbird famous for singing high in the air. Over centuries the long original form was worn down in speech to the short, blunt 'lark' we use today, which is why the modern spelling looks nothing like its early ancestor. The quite different sense of 'a bit of harmless fun or mischief' appeared in the early 1800s, and its origin is genuinely uncertain: it may come from a northern English and Scots dialect verb 'lake', meaning to play or frolic, which traces back to Old Norse leika 'to play', later reshaped by association with the lively, soaring bird. The expression 'up with the lark', meaning to rise very early, keeps the bird's dawn singing alive in everyday speech. Both senses are short and phonetic, so the word holds few traps for a confident speller.

How the word is built

• lark (single root, from Old English lāwerce, a songbird)