irk

name

1. A river in Greater Manchester, England, which joins the River Irwell in Manchester city centre.

noun

Etymology: Inherited from Middle English irken (“to tire, grow weary”), from Old Norse yrkja (“to work”), from Proto-Germanic *wurkijaną (“to work”), from Proto-Indo-European *werǵ- (“to work”). Cognate with Icelandic yrkja (“to compose”), Swedish yrka (“to urge, argue”), Old English wyrċan (“to work”). Doublet of work.

1. An annoyance.

   “The trade-off between computation cost and precision results in tuning parameters […] being exposed to the user, a major irk to practitioners of data science.”

verb

Etymology: Inherited from Middle English irken (“to tire, grow weary”), from Old Norse yrkja (“to work”), from Proto-Germanic *wurkijaną (“to work”), from Proto-Indo-European *werǵ- (“to work”). Cognate with Icelandic yrkja (“to compose”), Swedish yrka (“to urge, argue”), Old English wyrċan (“to work”). Doublet of work.

1. to irritate; annoy; bother

   “It irks me doing all this work and have someone wreck it.”

   “Let no man pray to Māna-Yood-Sushāī, for who shall trouble Māna with mortal woes or irk him with the sorrows of all the houses of Earth?”