work – English noun declension

English noun forms of work

Noun: work
Singularwork
Pluralworks

Sample Sentences

  • My work involves a lot of travel.
  • Come on Neriſſa, I haue worke in hand / That you yet know not of; wee'll ſee our husbands / Before they thinke of vs? [c. 1596–1598 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Merchant of Venice”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act III, scene iv], page 177, column 1:]
  • And in euery worke that he began[…]he did it with all his heart, and prospered. [1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, 2 Chronicles 31:21:]
  • Edward Churchill still attended to his work in a hopeless mechanical manner like a sleep-walker who walks safely on a well-known round. But his Roman collar galled him, his cossack stifled him, his biretta was as uncomfortable as a merry-andrew’s cap and bells. [1918, W[illiam] B[abington] Maxwell, chapter XXXIII, in The Mirror and the Lamp, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, →OCLC, page 257:]
  • He hasn’t come home yet; he’s still at work.
  • I want to go to the reunion concert, but I'm not sure if my work will give me the time off.
  • In trials of a Martin furnace in a steel work at Remscheiden, Germany, a lining of zirconia was found in good condition after[…] [1917, Platers' Guide, page 246:]
  • Holding a brick over your head is hard work. It takes a lot of work to write a dictionary.
  • Fifteen years of hard work went into the property's creation, which was undertaken by a legion of architects, designers, preservation and restoration experts, engineers, consultants, and artists. [2026 May 26, Julie Coe, “The Rest is History”, in Architectural Digest, volume 83, number 4, page 36:]
  • We know what we must do. Let's go to work.
  • We don't have much time. Let's get to work piling up those sandbags.
  • The Bat—they called him the Bat. Like a bat he chose the night hours for his work of rapine; like a bat he struck and vanished, pouncingly, noiselessly; like a bat he never showed himself to the face of the day. [1920, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Avery Hopwood, chapter I, in The Bat: A Novel from the Play (Dell Book; 241), New York, N.Y.: Dell Publishing Company, →OCLC, page 01:]
  • There's lots of work waiting for me at the office.
  • has had a lot of work done
  • Luckily, our eyes have grown accustomed after decades of Botox, fillers and extreme “work” going mainstream, so we don’t notice the weirdness and read it instead as maximum hotness. Thank you, progress! [2025 May 20, Marina Hyde, “Was this a hen do or a humanitarian mission to liberate Paris? Either way, give Lauren Sánchez an award”, in The Guardian, →ISSN:]
  • putting in work
  • Work is done against friction to drag a bag along the ground.
  • For quotations using this term, see Citations:work.
  • Turbines have been around for a long time—windmills and water wheels are early examples. The name comes from the Latin turbo, meaning "vortex", and thus the defining property of a turbine is that a fluid or gas turns the blades of a rotor, which is attached to a shaft that can perform useful work. [2013 July-August, Lee S. Langston, “The Adaptable Gas Turbine”, in American Scientist:]
  • There's a lot of guesswork involved.
  • We've got some paperwork to do before we can get started. The piece was decorated with intricate filigree work.
  • It is a work of art.
  • the poetic works of Alexander Pope
  • To leaue no Rubs nor Botches in the Worke: [c. 1606 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Macbeth”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act III, scene i], page 140, column 2:]
  • The haſty multitude / Admiring enter'd, and the work ſome praiſe / And ſome the Architect: [1667, John Milton, “Book I”, in Paradise Lost. […], London: […] [Samuel Simmons], and are to be sold by Peter Parker […]; [a]nd by Robert Boulter […]; [a]nd Matthias Walker, […], →OCLC; republished as Paradise Lost in Ten Books: […], London: Basil Montagu Pickering […], 1873, →OCLC, lines 730–732:]
  • “[…] We are engaged in a great work, a treatise on our river fortifications, perhaps? But since when did army officers afford the luxury of amanuenses in this simple republic?[…]” [1910, Emerson Hough, chapter I, in The Purchase Price: Or The Cause of Compromise, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, →OCLC:]
  • William the Conqueror fortified many castles, throwing up new ramparts, bastions and all manner of works.
  • Tell me you're using clean works at least.
  • He gave me a sour look. “All right is it? Well, you shoot some then.” I cooked up a grain and got out my works ready to take the shot. [1977 [1953], William S. Burroughs, edited by Allen Ginsberg, Junky, Penguin Books, →ISBN, pages 25–26:]
  • If you buy new works, clean them before using them. If you share works, clean them before you or the next person uses them. Blood may be in your works even if you can't see it. Clean your works either with rubbing alcohol (available in drugstores), a household bleach solution (three tablespoons of bleach in a cup of water), or boiling water. [1996, Paul Harding Douglas with Laura Pinsky, The Essential AIDS Fact Book, Simon and Schuster, →ISBN, page 25:]
  • While in San Francisco, where the AIDS crisis was particularly devastating, they saw numerous public awareness signs reading “Bleach Your Works” posted around the city, urging IV drug users to clean their needles with bleach to help staunch the spread of the disease. [2009, Gillian G. Gaar, The Rough Guide to Nirvana, Rough Guides UK, →ISBN:]
  • All told, werk is about creativity, virtuosity, and a certain kind of mastery. [2018 April 17, madison moore, Fabulous: The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric, Yale University Press, →ISBN, page 27:]
  • If the voice coming out of my body is legibly male, it complicates my presence. The work starts to approach that mysterious state of werq. [2022 January 25, Monique Jenkinson, Faux Queen: A Life in Drag, Bywater Books, →ISBN:]

Etymology

1. Etymology tree
2. Proto-Indo-European *werǵ-
3. Proto-Indo-European *-om
4. Proto-Indo-European *wérǵom
5. Proto-Germanic *werką
6. Proto-West Germanic *werk
7. Old English weorc
8. Middle English werk
9. English work
10. From Middle English work, werk, from Old English weorc, from Proto-West Germanic *werk, from Proto-Germanic *werką (“work”), from Proto-Indo-European *wérǵom (“work”), from Proto-Indo-European *werǵ- (“to make”).
11. Cognates
12. Cognate with Scots wark (“work”), North Frisian werk (“work”), Saterland Frisian Wierk (“work”), West Frisian wurk (“work”), Dutch werk (“work”), German Werk (“work”), German Low German Wark (“work”), Luxembourgish Wierk (“work”), Danish værk (“work”), Faroese, Icelandic, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, and Swedish verk (“work”); also Breton ober (“to do, make”), Cornish gul, gwul (“to do, make”), Irish and Scottish Gaelic fearg (“anger”), Manx ferg (“anger”), Pictish ᚒᚏᚏᚐᚉᚈ (urract, “he made”), Welsh gwneud, neud (“to do, make”), Greek έργο (érgo, “work”), Albanian argëtim (“entertainment; fun, pleasure”), argëtoj (“to amuse, entertain”), Lithuanian váržas (“fish snaring net”), Macedonian врша (vrša, “fish-trap”), Polish wiersza (“fish-trap”), Russian and Ukrainian ве́рша (vérša, “fish-trap”), Serbo-Croatian вр̑ша, vȓša (“fish-trap”), Slovak and Slovene vrša (“fish-trap”), Aghwan 𐔱𐕒𐕙𐔵 (borz, “labour, work”), Armenian գործ (gorc, “work”), Northern Kurdish werz (“bed, field, patch; season”), Avestan 𐬬𐬆𐬭𐬆𐬰 (vər^əz, “to do, work”), Persian ورز (varz, “art, craft, trade”), ورزه (varze, “art, profession, trade”), ورزیدن (varzidan, “to exercise; to train; to work”), Tocharian B warkṣäl (“energy, power, strength”). English cognates include bulwark, boulevard, energy, erg, georgic, liturgy, metallurgy, organ, surgeon, wright. Doublet of erg and ergon. See: Middle English Nouns 'work', Old English Nouns 'weorc', Dutch Nouns 'werk', German Nouns 'Werk', Danish Nouns 'værk', Greek Nouns 'έργο', Polish Nouns 'wiersza'.

Verbs referencing "work"

Ancient Greek Nouns ἔργον, Swedish Nouns yrke, Gothic Nouns 𐍅𐌰𐌿𐍂𐍃𐍄𐍅, Danish Nouns værk.