ark
/ɑːk
/noun
1 (the ark) (In the Bible) the ship built by Noah to save his family and two of every kind of animal from the Flood; Noah’s ark.
1.1 archaic A ship or boat.So many of the chapters offer versions of the ark, boats built for human survival against the storms of God and/or nature....
- And when she could not longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child therein; and she laid it in the flags by the river's brink.
- Irving Berlin sailed in his beloved ark to the age of 101.
2 short for Ark of the Covenant.
2.1 (also Holy Ark) A chest or cupboard housing the Torah scrolls in a synagogue.Surprisingly, similar domes were found on the two Holy Arks in Livorno on the western coast of Italy....
- The woodwork of the Aron Hakodesh, the Holy Ark in which the Torah is stored, is original.
- The bold phrase from the Psalms stands in relief over most Holy Arks in the synagogues.
3 (also ark shell) A small bivalve mollusc which attaches itself to rocks with byssus threads.
- Order Arcoidea: Arca and other genera.
- The oldest records about ark shells are found in Fishery Production List of 1814.
- More than seven species of the Ark shells are found in the Galveston Bay region.
4A low hut used to house livestock, often incorporating a covered run: we reassembled the pig ark in preparation for our spring arrivals poultry arks make useful supervised runs for guinea pigs...
- On Saturday we finished the fencing, stapling sheep netting to the rails, and on Sunday gave the pig ark and the old chook ark a coat of water-based preservative.
- We moved the laying hens into the small ark yesterday.
- We stopped counting the hens in their ark at night once the new arrivals had settled in - we'll now start doing so again.
Phrases
be out of (or have gone out with) the ark
Origin
Old English ærc, from Latin arca 'chest'.
Aerc was the Old English word for a chest, from Latin arca ‘a chest or box’. This developed into ark, as in the Ark of the Covenant, the wooden chest in which the tablets of the laws of the ancient Israelites were kept, and the Holy Ark in a synagogue, a chest, or cupboard which contained the scrolls of the Torah or Hebrew scriptures. A ship may be thought of as a floating container, hence Noah's Ark, the vessel built by Noah to escape the Flood. The Latin word is also the source of arcane (mid 16th century), which describes something hidden, concealed, or secret, as if it were shut up in a box, which only a few people can open.