Definition of "cark"

Carnal pleasures are the sins of youth: ambition and the love of power, the sins of middle age: covetousness and carking cares, the crimes of old age.

1831, Adam Clarke, Commentary on the Bible, Comment on 2 Timothy 2: 22

[W]e shall see how in morbid melancholy this sense of the unreality of things may become a carking pain, and even lead to suicide.

1902, William James, “Lecture 3”, in The Varieties of Religious Experience […] ‎, London: Longmans, Green & Co.

Thanks to that penny he had just spent so recklessly [on a newspaper] he would pass a happy hour, taken, for once, out of his anxious, despondent, miserable self. It irritated him shrewdly to know that these moments of respite from carking care would not be shared with his poor wife, with careworn, troubled Ellen.

1913, Mrs. [Marie] Belloc Lowndes, chapter I, in The Lodger, London: Methuen; republished in Novels of Mystery: The Lodger; The Story of Ivy; What Really Happened, New York, N.Y.: Longmans, Green and Co., […], page 0056

Why for sluggards cark and moil?

1849, Charles Kingsley, Alton Locke's Song

His heauie head, deuoide of carefull carke, / Whose sences all were straight benumbd and starke.

1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book I, Canto I”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, stanza 44

Fling cark and care aside.

1832, William Motherwell, They Come! The Merry Summer Months

Freedom from the cares of money and the cark of fashion.

1887, R. D. Blackmore, Springhaven