Word.ws English Dictionary

shirking

shirking is the present participle and gerund of shirk.

Meaning of shirk

Verb

shirk (third-person singular simple present shirks, present participle shirking, simple past and past participle shirked)

  1. (transitive) To avoid, especially a duty, responsibility, etc.; to stay away from.
    • the usual makeshift by which they try to shirk difficulties1826, Julius Hare, Guesses at Truth by Two Brothers
  2. (intransitive) To evade an obligation; to avoid the performance of duty, as by running away.
    • If you have a job, don't shirk from it by staying off work.
  3. (transitive) To procure by petty fraud and trickery; to obtain by mean solicitation.
    • You that never heard the call of any vocation, […] that shirk living from others, but time from yourselves.1635, Bishop Rainbow, Sermons

See all 6 meanings of shirk

Noun

shirking (plural shirkings)

  1. The act of one who shirks.
    • Autobiography […] inevitably consists mainly of extinctions of the truth, shirkings of the truth, partial revealments of the truth, with hardly an instance of plain straight truth […]1906-1907, Mark Twain, Chapters from My Autobiography
    • Midler has never been called a feminist, but one cannot call her anything else better. Every move in her career appears to be one more shirking of categorization.1983 December 3, Walta Borawski, “The Saga of Baby Divine (review)”, in Gay Community News, volume 11, number 20, page 10

Forms of shirking

pluralshirkings

Questions about shirking

What does shirking mean?
Shirking means the act of one who shirks.
What is shirking the present participle and gerund of?
Shirking is the present participle and gerund of shirk.
What part of speech is shirking?
Shirking is a noun.
What is the plural of shirking?
The plural of shirking is shirkings.

Words near shirking in the dictionary

  1. shirkers
  2. shirkest
  3. shirketh
  4. Shirkey
  5. Shirkeys
  6. shirking
  7. shirkings
  8. shirks
  9. shirky
  10. Shirky principle
  11. shirl

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: shirking (page history and authors); shirk (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:

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