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Harken - What does it mean?

harken | |

harken

English

Verb

(en verb)
  • ‘to listen, hear, regard’, more common form in the US.
  • * 1833 :
  • Œnone Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die.
  • * 1883:
  • We were not many minutes on the road, though we sometimes stopped to lay hold of each other and harken . But there was no unusual sound...
  • * 1942 ,
  • ... whom he had revered and harkened to and loved and lost and grieved:
  • (figuratively, US) To hark back, to return or revert (to a subject etc.), to allude to, to evoke, to long or pine for (a past event or era).
  • * 1994 , David Coogan, Electronic Writing Centers: Computing the Field of Composition , page 4
  • The emerging consensus that writing was merely transcribed speech, then, harkened back to the pre-disciplinary, liberal arts college
  • * 2005 , Carol Padden, Tom L. Humphries, Inside Deaf Culture , page 48
  • Bell argued that the manual approach was "backwards," and harkened to a primitive age where humans used gesture and pantomime.

    Usage notes

    The bare form harken has been used since the 1980s, though some authorities frown upon this and prefer the traditional form hark back.

    References

    * * Merriam-Webster’s dictionary of English usage, 1995, p. 497 * “ Hark/Hearken”, Paul Brians, Common Errors in English Usage, (2nd Edition, November, 2008)

    Anagrams

    * ----

    Not English

    has no English definition. It may be misspelled.