[U,C]
1 the outer covering of a tree
2 the short loud sound made by dogs and some other animals
3 a short loud sound made by a gun or a voice:
a bark of laughter
IDIOMS
sb's bark is worse than their bite (informal) used to say that sb is not really as angry or as fierce as they sound
Part of speech: verb
1 [V] ~ (at sb/sth) when a dog barks, it makes a short loud sound:
The dog suddenly started barking at us.
2 ~ (out) sth to give orders, ask questions, etc. in a loud, unfriendly way:
[VN] She barked out an order. * He barked questions at her. [also Vspeech]
3 (especially BrE) to rub the skin off your knee, etc. by falling or by knocking against sth
SYNGRAZE:
I barked my shins when I fell on the steps.
IDIOMS
be barking up the wrong tree (informal) to have the wrong idea about how to get or achieve sth:
You're barking up the wrong tree if you're expecting us to lend you any money.
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About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
This entry for bark is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is bark a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, bark is tagged as noun.
Does bark appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — bark appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.