Word.ws English Dictionary

ilk

/ɪlk/

ilk adjective: very; same.

Adjective

ilk (not comparable)

  1. (Northern England, Scotland, otherwise archaic) Very; same.
    • By semblaunt, was that ilke image1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book I, Canto IV”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC

Noun

ilk (plural ilks)

  1. A type, race, or category; a group of entities that have common characteristics such that they may be grouped together.
    • "Hinkydink” or “Bathhouse John,” or others of that ilk, were proprietors of the most notorious dives in Chicago[…]1905 April–October, Upton Sinclair, chapter XXV, in The Jungle, New York, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Company, published 26 February 1906, →OCLC
    • The cow is of the bovine ilk;
      One end is moo, the other, milk.1931, Ogden Nash, The Cow
    Synonyms:
    kind, likes, sort, type, hue, persuasion

ilk meaning in Malayalam and Kannada

ilk in Malayalam

sort, type, class
അതേതരം, അതേവർഗ്ഗത്തിൽപ്പെട്ടത്, തരം, മാതൃക, ഇനം, എനം

ilk in Kannada

ಬಗೆ

Examples of ilk in a sentence

  • Planets (and objects of their ilk) can be destroyed in collisions, by stellar vaporization, or tidal forces.
  • He and his ilk own the present.
  • We shall not see her ilk again.

All 11 example sentences with ilk

Synonyms of ilk

All synonyms of ilk

Forms of ilk

Adjective
alternative formilke
Noun
pluralilks

Origin of ilk

Inherited from Middle English ilke, from Old English ilca, conjectured as from Proto-Germanic *ilīkaz, a compound of *iz and *-līkaz from the noun *līką (“body”). The sense of “type”, “kind” is from the application of the phrase of that ilk to families: the word thus came to mean family.

Words formed from ilk

Words that rhyme with ilk

12 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about ilk

What does ilk mean?
Ilk means very; same.
What is ilk in Malayalam?
Ilk in Malayalam is അതേതരം, അതേവർഗ്ഗത്തിൽപ്പെട്ടത്, തരം. See Ilk meaning in Malayalam.
What part of speech is ilk?
Ilk can be an adjective or a noun.
How do you pronounce ilk?
Ilk is pronounced /ɪlk/.

Words near ilk in the dictionary

  1. ility
  2. ilium
  3. ilixanthin
  4. Ilizarov apparatus
  5. Ilizarov apparatuses
  6. ilk
  7. ilka
  8. Ilkeston
  9. ilkhan
  10. Ilkhanate
  11. Ilkhanid

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: ilk (page history and authors); ilk (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license); ilk (Kannada Wiktionary) (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-ilk.ogg, en-au-ilk.ogg.

Cite this entry: “ilk.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/ilk. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.