Etymology: Old English had cleric , clerec , clerc , immediately from Latin; the last of these forms coincided with Old French clerc < Romanic type *clerco < Latin clēricus , clēricum (compare Provençal clerc , clergue , clerge , Spanish clerigo , Italian chierico ): see cleric adj. and n. The original sense was ‘man in a religious order, cleric, clergyman’. As the scholarship of the Middle Ages was practically limited to the clergy, and these performed all the writing, notarial, and secretarial work of the time, the name ‘clerk’ came to be equivalent to ‘scholar’, and specially applicable to a notary, secretary, recorder, accountant, or penman. The last has now come to be the ordinary sense, all the others being either archaic, historical, formal, or contextual. The pronunciation /klɑːk/ is evidenced in the south of England from the 15th cent.; compare bark, hark, dark, etc., from earlier -er; also serjeant, hearth, Cherwell, Hertford, and the 15–17th cent. clargy. The dialects, especially the northern, have retained the e, as Scots /klɛrk/, /klerk/. In U.S. the pronunciation is /klɜːk/; ‘of late this has become somewhat frequent in London and its neighbourhood’ ( N.E.D.).

Etymology: < clerk n.