Other forms: barking, barks, barked
Bark is the rough outer skin of a tree. It comes off a plane tree in flat plates and off a birch in papery strips, and if you run a hand down an oak, that dry cracked surface under your fingers is the bark.
Bark is also the short hard noise a dog makes, and the verb for making it: the dog barked all night at nothing. People bark too — bark an order, bark at the staff — meaning to speak in short, hard bursts. The two barks have nothing to do with one another and simply ended up spelled the same way, which is worth knowing before you meet either in a sentence. Two phrases are worth carrying: his bark is worse than his bite, said of someone who sounds fiercer than he is, and barking up the wrong tree, which is looking for the answer in completely the wrong place.
1nountreeThe rough outer covering of a tree.~94%
“Strips of bark had peeled away from the trunk.”
2nounshortThe short loud sound a dog makes.~2%
“A single bark came from behind the door.”
3verbsoundTo make the short loud sound a dog makes.~2%
“The dogs barked at every car that passed the gate.”
4verbsharplyTo say something loudly and sharply.~2%
“The sergeant barked an order and everyone stood up.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 12 sentences found in the wild and placed 12 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
bark is part of a tree.
The history here belongs to the dog. Bark the noise is Old English beorcan, from a Proto-Indo-European root bherg-, to make a noise, to growl, to bark, itself from bher-, to drone or hum. Icelandic kept a close relative, barki, meaning the throat or windpipe — which is exactly where a bark comes from.
Proto-Indo-European
*bʰerg- — to make a noise, growl, bark
Proto-West Germanic
*berkan — to bark
Old English
beorcan — to bark
Middle English
barken
English, today
bark
Built from
From Middle English barken, berken, borken, from Old English beorcan (“to bark”), from the Proto-West Germanic berkan (“to bark”), from Proto-Indo-European bʰerg- (“to make a noise, growl, bark”), from bʰer- (“to drone, hum, buzz”). Cognate with Icelandic berkja (“to bark, bluster”), Icelandic barki (“throat, windpipe”), dialectal Lithuanian burgeti (“to growl, grumble, grouch, quarrel”), Serbo-Croatian brbljati (“to murmur”). For the noun, compare Old English beorc, bearce (“barking”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA