Beorcian

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. Old English verb meaning to make a loud sharp cry, such as a dog barking or a person shouting out
2. To give a harsh, loud vocal sound, as a dog does when it barks or a person does when calling out
3. Describing the act of uttering a loud, piercing noise, particularly the barking of a dog in early English

Etymology: Beorcian is an Old English verb meaning "to bark," the sound a dog makes. Its ancestry is ordinary Germanic: it descends from a Proto-Germanic base that also gave Old High German "bellan," the source of modern German "bellen," which still means the same thing. The English verb "bark" is therefore a cousin of the German word, and the two languages have kept the sense almost unchanged for well over a thousand years. The Old English form comes down to us in a handful of surviving texts, and it did not last. By the later medieval period, "beorcian" had given way to "berk" and then to the modern "bark," the spelling and pronunciation shifting as the vowel changed. The modern word, however, has an unexpected twin: "bark" is also the name for the outer covering of a tree, a sense that comes from an entirely different Germanic root related to "birch" and "bark" in the older sense of a tree's skin, not from the verb at all.