awk
Abbreviation with 2 meanings
| Stands for | Awkward |
|---|---|
| Meanings | 2 |
| Categories | Writing & Everyday, Technology & Computing |
awk has two meanings. It stands for Awkward (proofreading and correction mark) or Aho, Weinberger and Kernighan (programming).
Meanings of awk at a glance
| # | awk stands for | Context |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Awkward | Writing & Everyday › Proofreading and Correction Mark |
| 2 | Aho, Weinberger and Kernighan | Technology & Computing › Programming |
1. Awkward
Writing & Everyday · Proofreading and Correction Mark Abbreviations
Teacher's or editor's margin comment indicating that a sentence or phrase is clumsy, unclear or hard to read, even if not strictly ungrammatical. It is among the most common marks on student essays.
Example: My essay came back with awk written beside three sentences in the second paragraph.
Because "awk" does not say what is wrong, writing instructors recommend more specific comments; students can often fix such sentences by reading them aloud or splitting them in two. Common causes include wordiness, misplaced modifiers and unclear pronouns. In computing, AWK is a text-processing language named for its creators, Aho, Weinberger and Kernighan.
2. Aho, Weinberger and Kernighan
Technology & Computing · Programming Abbreviations
A Unix text-processing language that reads input line by line, splits each line into fields and runs actions on lines matching patterns, ideal for extracting columns and producing quick reports. Its name comes from its creators' surnames.
Example: The one-liner awk -F, '{sum += $3} END {print sum}' sales.csv totals the third column.
Created at Bell Labs in 1977 by Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger and Brian Kernighan, who later wrote "The AWK Programming Language" (1988, second edition 2023). Common implementations include gawk (GNU awk) and mawk. Perl was partly inspired by awk's capabilities. Written lowercase for the command and AWK for the language.
Related abbreviations
More proofreading and correction mark abbreviations
- AA – Author's alteration
- agr – Agreement error
- AQ – Author query
- bf – Boldface
- caps – Capitals
- CS – Comma splice
- DM – Dangling modifier
- frag – Sentence fragment
See all 29 proofreading and correction mark abbreviations →