from a northern English dialectal termlake /laik(“to play”) (around 1300, fromOld Norseleika(“to play (as opposed to work)”)), with an intrusive-r- as is common in southern British dialects; or
a shortening ofskylark (1809), sailors' slang, "play roughly in the rigging of a ship", because the common European larks were proverbial for high-flying; Dutch has a similar idea inspeelvogel(“playbird, a person of markedly playful nature”).
“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 thelark.”
2011 August 4, Stephen Holden, “Stoned Archive: Wild Ride Of the Merry Pranksters”, inThe New York Times[2],→ISSN:
Thanks partly to Tom Wolfe’s raised-eyebrow account, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” that bohemianlark has been retrospectively hailed as the flash point of the emerging hippie counterculture.
2018 November, Alexis C. Madrigal, “The Dangers of YouTube for Young Children”, inThe Atlantic[3]:
What began as alark has grown into something very, very big, inflating the company’s ambitions.
doolittle.[…] [T]hanks to your silly joking, he leaves me a share in his Pre-digested Cheese Trust worth three thousand a year on condition that I lecture for his Wannafeller Moral Reform World League as often as they ask me up to six times a year. /higgins. The devil he does! Whew! [Brightening suddenly] What alark!
[T]hey laugh at us old boys,” thought old Pendennis. And he was not far wrong; the times and manners which he admired were pretty nearly gone—the gay young men “larked” him irreverently[…]
[…] the porter at the rail-road had seen a scuffle; or when he found it was likely to bring him in as a witness, then it might not have been a scuffle, only a littlelarking[…]
The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables. See instructions atWiktionary:Entry layout § Translations.
lark on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
Category:Alaudidae on Wikimedia Commons.Wikimedia Commons
Alaudidae on Wikispecies.Wikispecies