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ICELANDIC · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

karl.

man (male human)

4 characters1 syllables approx.Íslenska language

Meaning & usage

noun[ˈkʰartl̥][ˈkʰatl̥]
  1. man (male human)

    masculine
  2. husband

    masculine
  3. male (of a species)

    masculine
  4. a character (cf. English guy, Swedish gubbe, with the same sense)

    masculine
  5. chess piece, chessman (cf. English guys, Swedish gubbar, “men” as a game resource)

    masculine
Where this word comes from

Inherited from Old Norse karl, from Proto-Norse *ᚲᚨᚱᛁᛚᚨᛉ (*karilaʀ), from Proto-Germanic *karilaz. Being West Norse, Icelandic senses have overall developed analogously to East Norse cognate Swedish karl (“(manly) man; husband”), compared to East Norse cognate Danish karl (“farmhand”).

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karl studiokarl workshello, karl

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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.