Lark Meaning
/lɑːk/Definition, CEFR level C1, pronunciation, examples, and quiz.
Listen pronunciation
Definition
nounAny of various small, singing passerine birds of the family Alaudidae.
nounAny of various similar-appearing birds, but usually ground-living, such as the meadowlark and titlark.
Sentence Examples
Mrs. Lark played the piano and the children sang.
Every Tuesday morning an old lady called Mrs. Lark came to the school.
It was the lark, the herald of the morn, no nightingale.
CEFR Practice Quiz
At dawn, a cheerful ____ began to sing from the top of the tall oak tree.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
We woke up early this morning to the beautiful song of a ____ that was singing in the garden nearby.
Word Origin & History
From Middle English larke, laverke, from Old English lāwerce, lǣwerce, lāuricæ, from Proto-West Germanic *laiwarikā, from Proto-Germanic *laiwarikǭ, *laiwazikǭ (compare dialectal West Frisian larts, Dutch leeuwerik, German Lerche), from *laiwaz (borrowed into Finnish leivo, Estonian lõo), of unknown ultimate origin with no definitive cognates outside of Germanic.
Literary Quotations & Historical Citations
"Charles Randolph Grean is married to pop lark and multi-hit artist Betty Johnson."
— 1990, Wayne Jancik, The Billboard Book of One-Hit Wonders, →ISBN, page 238:
"‘Ha! ha!’ laughed Master Bates, ‘what a lark that would be, wouldn’t it, Fagin? I say, how the Artful would bother ’em wouldn’t he?’"
— 1838, Boz [pseudonym; Charles Dickens], chapter 43, in Oliver Twist; […], volume (please specify |volume=I, II, or III), London: Richard Bentley, […], →OCLC:
"“Oh, dear, no,” said the young Englishman; “my cousin was coming over on some business, so I just came across, at an hour’s notice, for the lark.”"
— 1878, Henry James, An International Episode:
"Thanks partly to Tom Wolfe’s raised-eyebrow account, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” that bohemian lark has been retrospectively hailed as the flash point of the emerging hippie counterculture."
— 2011 August 4, Stephen Holden, “Stoned Archive: Wild Ride Of the Merry Pranksters”, in The New York Times, →ISSN:
"What began as a lark has grown into something very, very big, inflating the company’s ambitions."
— 2018 November, Alexis C. Madrigal, “The Dangers of YouTube for Young Children”, in The Atlantic:
Explore More C1 Vocabulary Words
CEFR Practice Quiz
At dawn, a cheerful ____ began to sing from the top of the tall oak tree.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
We woke up early this morning to the beautiful song of a ____ that was singing in the garden nearby.