SHIRK • FREE-TRANSLATOR.COM • Definition of Shirk

Translators

Dictionaries

Courses

Other

Home

Add this Dictionary
to your website!
See more options...

/ʃərk/ Listen

verb

Shirk v. t. (past & past part. shirked; pres. part. shirking)

To procure by petty fraud and trickery; to obtain by mean solicitation. "You that never heard the call of any vocation,... that shirk living from others, but time from Yourselves."

To avoid; to escape; to neglect; implying unfaithfulness or fraud; as, to shirk duty. "The usual makeshift by which they try to shirk difficulties."

Shirk v. i.

To live by shifts and fraud; to shark.

To evade an obligation; to avoid the performance of duty, as by running away. "One of the cities shirked from the league."

noun

Shirk n. One who lives by shifts and tricks; one who avoids the performance of duty or labor.

See images of 'Shirk'

Etymology of 'Shirk'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

Share |

"Shirk" Quotes from Famous Books

... foreigners are each year added to the voting population, whose ballots in the aggregate defeat the will of our enlightened, American-born citizens. Besides, it is a too convenient way for a legislature to shirk its own responsibility. If the demand is made, I hope it may be done in connection with that for ...

— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

... hastened to reply. "I am the last man to wish you to shirk your duly; but you cannot have the temerity to declare that this young and tender creature can by any possibility be considered as at all likely to be implicated in a crime so monstrous and unnatural. ...

— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green

... and showed it. She could not understand a man who had displayed such warm, even touching, appreciation of her kindness leaving her without a word, taking the opportunity of her momentary absence to disappear, to shirk away—for she put it like ...

— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens

... returned to the welcome and the caresses of little Weena. But next morning I perceived clearly enough that my curiosity regarding the Palace of Green Porcelain was a piece of self-deception, to enable me to shirk, by another day, an experience I dreaded. I resolved I would make the descent without further waste of time, and started out in the early morning towards a well near the ruins ...

— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

... thrilling sight; for none knew better than they the implacably savage nature of the brutes they were about to contend with, or the deadliness of the peril to which they were so light-heartedly exposing themselves. Yet not one of them manifested the slightest disposition to shirk the encounter: possibly they all knew that to perish upon the horns of a buffalo would be preferable to the punishment that surely awaited them should they disgrace themselves and their king by showing fear in the presence of a white man. But if the riders ...

— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood

More quotes...