overwordExplorer
ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

irk.

to irritate; annoy; bother

3 characters1 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

verb/ɜːk/Received-Pronunciation/ɝk/General-American

  1. to irritate; annoy; bother

    transitive
    It irks me doing all this work and have someone wreck it.
Where this word comes from

Inherited from Middle English irken (“to tire, grow weary”), from Old Norse yrkja (“to work”), from Proto-Germanic *wurkijaną (“to work”), from Proto-Indo-European *werǵ- (“to work”). Cognate with Icelandic yrkja (“to compose”), Swedish yrka (“to urge, argue”), Old English wyrċan (“to work”). Doublet of work.

noun/ɜːk/Received-Pronunciation/ɝk/General-American

  1. An annoyance.

Where this word comes from

Inherited from Middle English irken (“to tire, grow weary”), from Old Norse yrkja (“to work”), from Proto-Germanic *wurkijaną (“to work”), from Proto-Indo-European *werǵ- (“to work”). Cognate with Icelandic yrkja (“to compose”), Swedish yrka (“to urge, argue”), Old English wyrċan (“to work”). Doublet of work.

FROM WORD TO NAME

Try it on your idea.

irk has 3 characters. Say it out loud, try it alongside a description of your project, and see whether its meaning fits what you want to create.

irk studioirk workshello, irk

These are naming prompts. Meanings and pronunciation can vary; existing brand and domain uses have not been checked.

Explore the name generator

A word with a source.

Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.