awk means A Unix scripting language for text processing, or the command line interface itself. It carries an Arena rating of 1385, earned across 3 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, awk ranks #1,680 of 17,122 for Most Betrayed by Its Sound, #2,252 of 17,123 for Most Malleable Words, #3,420 of 17,140 for The Improbable, #4,839 of 17,150 for Funniest Words.
awk is pronounced /ɔːk/.
Why “awk” is a great word
Clumsy in performance or manners; not dexterous; awkward. From the initial letters of the surnames of its authors: Alfred Aho, Peter J. Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan, coined in the 1970s. Unlike 'clumsy,' which implies fumbling hands or missteps, or 'ungainly,' which suggests a gangly, ill-proportioned motion, 'awk' is the digital age's quiet judgment of a system operating contrary to intention. It is the command that fails silently, the script that produces a perfectly valid but sinisterly wrong output, the tool that functions exactly as designed yet feels profoundly out of order—a word born of utility that somehow named its own spiritual condition.
Etymology
From the initial letters of the surnames of its authors: Alfred Aho, Peter J. Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan.
name
- A Unix scripting language for text processing, or the command line interface itself.e.g.“I used C, Perl, the Bourne shell, and some AWK and Tcl to implement these projects.”
adj
- Odd; out of order; perverse.
- Wrong, or not commonly used; clumsy; sinister.e.g.“the awk end of hir charmed rod”
- Clumsy in performance or manners; not dexterous; awkward.e.g.“[…] 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 […]”
- Awkward; uncomfortable.
adv
- Perversely; in the wrong way.
Words closest in meaning
By meaning, not spelling — each word's AI semantic fingerprint, nearest first.