awk

Meanings

Adjective

• Odd; out of order; perverse.
• Wrong, or not commonly used; clumsy; sinister
• Clumsy in performance or manners; not dexterous; awkward.
• Awkward; uncomfortable.

Adverb

• Perversely; in the wrong way.

Proper Noun

• A Unix scripting language or the command line interface itself.

Origin

• From Middle English, from Old Norse ǫfugr, ǫfigr, afigr (whence Danish avet ("backwards"), Swedish avig ("turned backwards")), from Proto-Germanic *abuhaz. Cognate with German äbich, Gothic 𐌹𐌱𐌿𐌺𐍃 ("turned back"). Akin to Sanskrit अपाच् ("turned away") . Compare dialectal Danish ave ("to turn"), Icelandic öfga ("to reverse").
• From the initial letters of the surnames of its authors: Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan.