German

Noun

Harken

1. plural of Harke

English

Verb

harken ‎(third-person singular simple present harkens, present participle harkening, simple past and past participle harkened)

1. Alternative spelling of hearken ‘to listen, hear, regard’, more common form in the US.
   • 1833: Alfred Tennyson

     Œnone Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die.

   • 1883: Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island

     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, William Faulkner, The Bear

     ... whom he had revered and harkened to and loved and lost and grieved:

2. (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

• harken in The Century Dictionary, The Century Co., New York, 1911
• Merriam-Webster’s dictionary of English usage, 1995, p. 497
• “Hark/Hearken”, Paul Brians, Common Errors in English Usage, (2nd Edition, November, 2008)

Anagrams

• hanker

Dutch

Pronunciation

Etymology

From early modern Dutch harcken, hercken, from hark ‎(“rake”).

Verb

harken

1. to rake, to use the rake on

Inflection

Related terms

• hark