Work
verbTo carry out labour or a task, or to operate and function as intended.
How to spell work
4 letters · 1 syllable
How to pronounce work
What does work mean?
- verbTo carry out labour or a task, or to operate and function as intended.
- nounActivity involving effort done to achieve a result, or the result of such effort.
Work in a sentence
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verb
She likes to work from home on Fridays.
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noun
He left for work at half past seven this morning.
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verb
The new printer does not work properly.
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noun
The gallery displayed her latest work near the entrance.
Where does work come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
Work comes from the Old English noun weorc and the verb wyrcan, meaning a deed, an action, or the effort spent in doing something. These trace back to a shared Germanic root that also produced the German Werk and the Dutch werk, all carrying the basic idea of an act performed or a thing made. The same ancient root surfaces in the Greek ergon, 'task' or 'deed', which is why scientific words like 'energy' and 'erg' are distant cousins of plain English work. The spelling has stayed remarkably stable, though the 'or' vowel can mislead writers because it is pronounced like 'er' rather than the 'or' in 'fork'. As one of the oldest and most frequent words in the language, work has carried both its noun sense (labour, a finished product) and its verb sense (to labour, to function) since well before the Norman Conquest.
How the word is built
- work (from Old English weorc: deed, labour, action); a single Germanic root with no prefix or suffix
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