shirk

Other forms of shirk

past tense

shirked·

present participle

shirking·

third person

shirks·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about shirk

What does shirk mean?

shirk means "avoid (one's assigned duties)". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in shirk?

shirk has 1 syllable: shirk. In IPA it is /ˈʃɝk/.

What is another word for shirk?

Close synonyms include fiddle, shrink from, goldbrick. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is shirk a common word?

shirk is banded "Uncommon" — turns up in careful writing rather than conversation. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.