awk

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ɔːk/

  • Audio (Southern England)

    (file)

• (US) IPA^(key): /ɔːk/
• (US, cot–caught merger) IPA^(key): /ɑːk/
• Rhymes: -ɔːk, -ɑːk
• Homophone: auk

From Middle English [Term?], from Old Norse ǫfugr, ǫfigr, afigr (“turned backwards”) (whence Danish avet (“backwards”), Swedish avig (“turned backwards”)), from Proto-Germanic *abuhaz.[1] Cognate with German äbich, Gothic 𐌹𐌱𐌿𐌺𐍃 (ibuks, “turned back”).[2] Akin to Sanskrit अपाच् (apāc, “turned away”).[3] Compare dialectal Danish ave (“to turn”), Dutch averechts (“opposite, backwards, contrary”), Icelandic öfga (“to reverse”).

awk (comparative more awk, superlative most awk)

1. (obsolete) Odd; out of order; perverse.
2. (obsolete) Wrong, or not commonly used; clumsy; sinister.
   • 1567, Arthur Golding, Metamorphoses:

     the awk end of hir charmed rod

3. (obsolete, UK, dialect) Clumsy in performance or manners; not dexterous; awkward.

   Synonym: unhandy

   • 1815 Sir Egerton Brydges, Archaica: Harvey's Four letters, and sonnets, touching Robert Greene; Pierce's supererogation; [and] New letter of notable contents. Brathwaite's Essays upon the five senses, From the private press of Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, printed by T. Davison, p142

     […] whose wild and madbrain humour nothing fitteth so just, as the stalest dudgen or absurdest balductum, that they or their mates can invent in odd and awk speeches […]

4. (US slang, of a situation) Awkward; uncomfortable.

• awkly
• awkness
• awkward

awk (comparative more awk, superlative most awk)

1. (obsolete) Perversely; in the wrong way.

From the initial letters of the surnames of its authors: Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan.

awk

1. (computer languages) A Unix scripting language for text processing, or the command line interface itself.

   I used C, Perl, the Bourne shell, and some awk and tcl to implement these projects.

   • 2002, Æleen Frisch, Essential System Administration: Tools and Techniques for Linux and Unix Administration, 3rd edition, O'Reilly, →ISBN, page 77:

     One thing awk is good for is picking out and possibly rearranging columns within command output.

• “awk”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.

• Kaw, Kwa, kaw