Harken
Pronunciation
- RP IPA: /ˈhÉ‘ËkÉ™n/
- Rhymes: -É‘Ë(r)kÉ™n
Full definition of harken
Verb
- Alternative spelling of hearken ‘to listen, hear, regard’, more common form in the US.
- 1833: Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron TennysonÅ’none Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die.
- 1883: Robert Louis Stevenson, 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, ... 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 4The 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 48Bell 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.