awkward [LME] There used to be a word awk, based on an Old Norse afugr, that meant ‘turned the wrong way round’. So awkward meant ‘in an awk direction’, ‘in the wrong direction, in reverse order, upside down’. It could be applied, for instance, to an animal that was on its back and was unable to get up. The meaning ‘clumsy or ungainly’ developed in the 16th century, followed by other meanings such as ‘embarrassing’, or ‘difficult to deal with’.