lark

noun

1. Any of various small, singing passerine birds of the family Alaudidae.
2. Any of various similar-appearing birds, but usually ground-living, such as the meadowlark and titlark.
3. (broadly)One who wakes early; one who is up with the larks.
4. A jolly or peppy person.

   “Charles Randolph Grean is married to pop lark and multi-hit artist Betty Johnson.”

5. A frolic or romp, some fun.

   “‘Ha! ha!’ laughed Master Bates, ‘what a lark that would be, wouldn’t it, Fagin? I say, how the Artful would bother ’em wouldn’t he?’”

   ““Oh, dear, no,” said the young Englishman; “my cousin was coming over on some business, so I just came across, at an hour’s notice, for the lark.””

   “Thanks partly to Tom Wolfe’s raised-eyebrow account, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” that bohemian lark has been retrospectively hailed as the flash point of the emerging hippie counterculture.”

   “What began as a lark has grown into something very, very big, inflating the company’s ambitions.”

6. A prank.

   “doolittle. […] [T]hanks to your silly joking, he leaves me a share in his Pre-digested Cheese Trust worth three thousand a year on condition that I lecture for his Wannafeller Moral Reform World League as often as they ask me up to six times a year. / higgins. The devil he does! Whew! [Brightening suddenly] What a lark!”

verb

1. (intransitive)To catch larks (a type of bird).

   “to go larking”

2. To sport, engage in harmless pranking.

   “[T]hey laugh at us old boys,” thought old Pendennis. And he was not far wrong; the times and manners which he admired were pretty nearly gone—the gay young men “larked” him irreverently […]”

   “[…] the porter at the rail-road had seen a scuffle; or when he found it was likely to bring him in as a witness, then it might not have been a scuffle, only a little larking […]”

3. To frolic, engage in carefree adventure.

name

1. A surname transferred from the nickname, from lark as a byname or for a catcher and seller of larks.
2. A surname originating as a patronymic shortened from Larkin, a medieval diminutive of Laurence.
3. A male given name transferred from the surname, of occasional usage.
4. A female given name from English from the lark bird.

   “Mama had chosen the name Lark. Lark Browning Erhardt. Papa had wanted to call me Beverly Mary; Mary after the Blessed Virgin. Mama said she wouldn't hang a name like Beverly Mary on a pet skunk. Where she got the idea for Lark, I don't know, though one time when I asked, she said that larks flew high and had a happy song.”

5. A river in England, on the border between Suffolk and Cambridgeshire.
6. (alt-of, alternative)Alternative form of Larak (“island off the coast of Iran”).