Webster
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Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary · 1913

Eke

Eke (ēk), v. t. [imp. & p. p. Eked; p. pr. & vb. n. Eking.] [AS. ēkan, ȳkan; akin to OFries, āka, OS. ōkian, OHG. ouhhōn to add, Icel. auka to increase, Sw. öka, Dan. öge, Goth. aukan, L. augere, Skr. ōjas strength, ugra mighty, and probably to English wax, v. i. Cf. Augment, Nickname.] To increase; to add to; to augment; — now commonly used with out, the notion conveyed being to add to, or piece out by a laborious, inferior, or scanty addition; as, to eke out a scanty supply of one kind with some other. "To eke my pain." Spenser.

He eked out by his wits an income of barely fifty pounds. Macaulay.

Eke, adv. [AS. eác; akin to OFries. ák, OS. ōk, D. ook, OHG. ouh, G. auch, Icel. auk, Sw. och and, Dan. og, Goth. auk for, but. Prob. from the preceding verb.] In addition; also; likewise. [Obs. or Archaic]

'T will be prodigious hard to prove That this is eke the throne of love. Prior.

A trainband captain eke was he Of famous London town. Cowper.

☞ Eke serves less to unite than to render prominent a subjoined more important sentence or notion. Mätzner.

Eke, n. An addition. [R.]

Clumsy ekes that may well be spared. Geddes.

Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Noah Porter, editor (Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913). Public domain. Text as transcribed by MICRA, Inc., from Project Gutenberg. Changed for Deep Dive Bible: Greek, which our source spelled in Latin letters, set in Greek letters; entries of one spelling merged into one article; Greek words our source left out (shown as “?”), read from the 1898 printing, from the same plates (the Library of Congress’s copy), where the place could be found with certainty. Of the others, 1,362 (a word or a single letter each) were inferred by AI from the context by the dictionary’s own rules and are marked with a wavy underline (tap or point at one to see the note); the rest, which could not be inferred with confidence, are left as “?”.