awk
Odd; out of order; perverse.
Adjective
- Odd; out of order; perverse.
- Wrong, or not commonly used; clumsy; sinister.
- the awk end of hir charmed rod - 1567, Arthur Golding, Metamorphoses:
- Clumsy in performance or manners; not dexterous; awkward.
- […] 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 […] - 1815 Sir Egerton Brydges, Archaica: Harvey's...
Synonyms: unhandy
- Awkward; uncomfortable.
Origin
Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *h₂ep Proto-Indo-European *-o Proto-Indo-European *h₂epó Proto-Indo-European *h₃ekʷ- Proto-Indo-European *h₂époh₃kʷos Proto-Germanic *abuhaz Old Norse ǫfugrder. Middle English awke English awk From Middle English awke, from Old Norse ǫfugr, ǫfigr, afigr (“turned backwards”) (whence Danish avet (“backwards”), Swedish avig (“turned backwards”)), from Proto-Germanic *abuhaz. Cognate with German äbich, Gothic 𐌹𐌱𐌿𐌺𐍃 (ibuks, “turned back”). Akin to Sanskrit अपाच् (apāc, “turned away”). Compare dialectal Danish ave (“to turn”), Dutch averechts (“opposite, backwards, contrary”), Icelandic öfga (“to reverse”).
Forms
Derived
Adverb
- Perversely; in the wrong way.
- Ill huſbandry drowſeth at fortune ſo awke, / good huſbandry rowſeth him ſelfe like a hawke. - 1570, Thomas Tusser, “Comparing Good Husband with Vnthrift His Brother, the Better Descerneth the Tone from the Tother”, in A...
Forms
Interjection
- Alternative spelling of och.
Proper noun
- Alternative letter-case form of AWK.
- One thing awk is good for is picking out and possibly rearranging columns within command output. - 2002, Æleen Frisch, Essential System Administration: Tools and Techniques for Linux and Unix Administration, 3rd...
- Must have exp w/ shell, incl Bash, & command line text processing incl grep, awk, & sed. - 2022 October 23, Red Hat, Inc., “Senior Software Engineer”, in The News & Observer, volume 158, number 296, Raleigh, N.C.,...