Etymology Inherited from Middle English irken (“to tire, grow weary”), from Old Norse yrkja (“to work”), from Proto-Germanic *wurkijaną (“to work”), from Proto-Indo-European *werǵ- (“to work”). Cognate with Icelandic yrkja (“to compose”), Swedish yrka (“to urge, argue”), Old English wyrċan (“to work”). Doublet of work.
1
to irritate; annoy; bother
It irks me doing all this work and have someone wreck it.
Let no man pray to Māna-Yood-Sushāī, for who shall trouble Māna with mortal woes or irk him with the sorrows of all the houses of Earth?1905, Lord Dunsany [i.e., Edward Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany], The Gods of Pegāna, London: [Charles] Elkin Mathews, […], →OCLC:
Etymology Inherited from Middle English irken (“to tire, grow weary”), from Old Norse yrkja (“to work”), from Proto-Germanic *wurkijaną (“to work”), from Proto-Indo-European *werǵ- (“to work”). Cognate with Icelandic yrkja (“to compose”), Swedish yrka (“to urge, argue”), Old English wyrċan (“to work”). Doublet of work.
1
An annoyance.
The trade-off between computation cost and precision results in tuning parameters […] being exposed to the user, a major irk to practitioners of data science.2022, Philipp Hennig, Michael A. Osborne, Hans P. Kersting, Probabilistic Numerics, page 13: