Other forms: walking, walks, walked
To walk is to move on your feet at a normal, easy speed. Walk to work, walk the dog, go for a walk.
As a noun, a walk is both the journey and the activity: a ten-minute walk, a walk in the hills. Walk out means to leave in protest, and a walkout is a strike. Walk of life means a person's social or occupational background. Note walk all over somebody, meaning to treat them with contempt; walk on eggshells; and that in British usage you walk the dog and in cricket a batsman walks by leaving the field before being given out.
1verbwalkTo move on your feet at an ordinary speed.~67%
“She walked to work for about eleven years.”
2nounjourneyA journey or outing on foot.~33%
“Let's go for a walk in the park after lunch.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 16 sentences found in the wild and placed 12 of them on a sense (4 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
walk is a way of moving.
Old English wealcan meant to roll or toss about, and the sense of travelling on foot is a later English development. The older meaning survives in fulling cloth, where a walker was somebody who trod wool — which is where the surname Walker comes from.
Proto-Indo-European
*welH-
Old English
wealcan — to move around; to revolve; to roll; to fluctuate; to discuss
Middle English
walk
English, today
walk
Built from
From Middle English walk, walke, walken, walkyn, wolken (“to roll, toss, or turn; to walk; to move; to be living; to beat or full; to perform”), a conflation of Old English wealcan (“to move around; to revolve; to roll; to fluctuate; to discuss”) (ġewealcan (“to go, traverse; to roll”)) and Old English wealcian (“to curl, roll up, twist; to wrinkle”); both from Proto-West Germanic walkan, from Proto-Germanic walkaną (“to roll, toss, turn, wind; to walk, wander, wend; to full, trample”), walkōną (“to roll about; to full”), from Proto-Indo-European walg- (“to twist, turn, move”). 2 Cognate with bar woikn (“to full, tan; to knead dough; to roll out dough”), cim balchan (“to beat, hit, strike”), Dutch zwalken (“to walk around”), German walken (“to full, tan, walk; to knead; to beat up”), Danish valke (“to full, walk, waulk”), Faroese válka (“make dirty; stir up dirt”), Swedish valka (“to full cloth, to waulk”); also Latin valgus (“bent out; bandy, bow-legged”). More at vagrant and whelk. Doublet of waulk.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA