British Word of the Day

narked also nark‧y [not before noun] British English informal

angry about something:

There's no need to get narked about it!

In Sun and Candlelight, Tommy, a young child on sister's orthopaedic ward, says, "'Ere sister, wot's got inter yer? Yer look real narked."

I imagine that Napoleon was narked about the outcome of the Battle of Waterloo.


In America to 'narc' (same sound) is to align yourself with a narcotics officer by snitching on someone using illegal narcotics.

• "Ricky became a narc when he told the cops about those suspicious brownies his friends were making."
• "Don't let the narc know why we are so interested in cannabis habitats"

'Narc' is particularly employed in 1980s era After-school Specials where a young girl narcs on her drug-fueled friends and is ostracized thereafter until an unkind fate leads one to have his younger sibling drown in a pool as a result of discovering his drug paraphernalia hidden in a hollowed out edition of Great Expectations.

I like the British narked better.

**Nurse Ratched, in the above picture, is from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The Founding Bettys' small Oregon hometown has only a few claims to fame. The other two are murders and one is that the author Ken Kesey, graduated from our high school. When I attended in the early 90s he came to deliver a profanity laced egotistic tirade about...hmm...not sure. I was 15. Swearing in a public school distracted me. Anyway, he looked narked about something.