Other forms: folks
Folk means ordinary people, said warmly and plainly. Country folk, town folk, the folk round here.
It takes a plural verb without an s, though folks with an s is common in American English and is used as a friendly form of address. The word has a whole cultural life, since folk music, folk tales and folklore all name the traditions of ordinary people rather than of institutions, and the folk revival was a real movement. Your folks means your parents.
1nounfolkPeople in general, spoken of warmly.
“The folk round here have long memories.”
2nountraditionalTraditional music and culture of ordinary people.
“She plays folk in a pub on Thursdays.”
Also accepted in games: folks
Folk may come from a root meaning to fill. Proto-Germanic fulką is thought to go back to pleh, to fill, so a folk was a crowd: the people who fill a place.
Proto-Indo-European
*pleh₁-
Middle English
folk
English, today
folk
Built from
From Middle English folk. From Middle English folk, from Old English folc, from Proto-West Germanic folk, from Proto-Germanic fulką, possibly from Proto-Indo-European pl̥h₁-gós, from pleh₁- (“to fill”). Cognate with stq Foulk, West Frisian folk, Dutch volk, German Low German and German Volk, Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and Swedish folk, Faroese and Icelandic fólk. a doublet of volk.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA