harken

See hearken

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈhɑːk(ə)n/

• Audio (Southern England)

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• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˈhɑɹkən/
• Rhymes: -ɑː(ɹ)kən
• Hyphenation: hark‧en

harken (third-person singular simple present harkens, present participle harkening, simple past and past participle harkened)

1. (transitive, intransitive, chiefly US) Alternative spelling of hearken: to hear, to listen, to have regard.
   • 1697, Virgil, “The Fourth Book of the Georgics”, in John Dryden, transl., The Works of Virgil: Containing His Pastorals, Georgics, and Æneis. […], London: […] Jacob Tonson, […], →OCLC, page 143, lines 690–693:

     Ev'n from the depths of Hell the Damn'd advance, / Th' Infernal Manſions nodding ſeem to dance; / The gaping three-mouth'd Dog forgets to ſnarl, / The Furies harken, and their Snakes uncurl.

   • 1843 January, Edgar A[llan] Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, in J[ames] Russell Lowell, R[obert] Carter, editors, The Pioneer. A Literary and Critical Magazine, volume I, number I, Boston, Mass.: Leland and Whiting, […], →OCLC, page 29, column 1:

     How, then, am I mad? Harken! and observe how healthily—how calmly I can tell you the whole story.

   • 1942, William Faulkner, “The Bear”, in Go Down, Moses, New York, N.Y.: Random House, →OCLC, section 5, page 326:

     [T]he mother who had shaped him if any had toward the man he almost was, [...] whom he had revered and harkened to and loved and lost and grieved: [...]

2. (intransitive, US, figuratively) 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).
   • 2005, Carol Padden, Tom L. Humphries, Inside Deaf Culture, page 48:

     Bell argued that the manual approach was "backwards," and harkened to a primitive age where humans used gesture and pantomime.

Where sense 2 is concerned, the bare form harken has been used since the 1980s, though some authorities frown upon this and prefer the traditional form hark back.

• harken back

• “harken”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911, →OCLC.
• Merriam-Webster’s dictionary of English usage, 1995, page 497
• “Hark/Hearken”, Paul Brians, Common Errors in English Usage, (2nd Edition, November, 2008)

• hanker

From early modern Dutch harcken, hercken, from hark (“rake”).

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• Rhymes: -ɑrkən

harken

1. to rake, to use a rake on

• hark

• Afrikaans: hark
• → Papiamentu: harka
• → Sranan Tongo: ar'ari, har'hari
  • → Caribbean Javanese: ari-ari

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• Audio

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harken (weak, third-person singular present harkt, past tense harkte, past participle geharkt, auxiliary haben)

1. (regional, Northern Germany) to rake

• “harken” in Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache
• “harken” in OpenThesaurus.de