Definition of "lark"

Charles Randolph Grean is married to pop lark and multi-hit artist Betty Johnson.

1990, Wayne Jancik, The Billboard Book of One-Hit Wonders, page 238

‘Ha! ha!’ laughed Master Bates, ‘what a lark that would be, wouldn’t it, Fagin? I say, how the Artful would bother ’em wouldn’t he?’

1838, Boz [pseudonym; Charles Dickens], chapter 43, in Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy’s Progress. […], volumes (please specify |volume=I, II, or III), London: Richard Bentley, […]

Thanks partly to Tom Wolfe’s raised-eyebrow account, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” that bohemian lark has been retrospectively hailed as the flash point of the emerging hippie counterculture.

2011 August 4, Stephen Holden, “Stoned Archive: Wild Ride Of the Merry Pranksters”, in The New York Times‎

What began as a lark has grown into something very, very big, inflating the company’s ambitions.

2018 November, Alexis C. Madrigal, “The Dangers of YouTube for Young Children”, in The Atlantic‎

DOOLITTLE. […] thanks to your silly joking, he leaves me a share in his Pre-digested Cheese Trust worth three thousand a year on condition that I lecture for his Wannafeller Moral Reform World League as often as they ask me […] .HIGGINS. The devil he does! Whew! [Brightening suddenly] What a lark!

1912, George Bernard Shaw, “Act V”, in Pygmalion‎

[T]hey laugh at us old boys,” thought old Pendennis. And he was not far wrong; the times and manners which he admired were pretty nearly gone—the gay young men “larked” him irreverently […]

1848 November – 1850 December, William Makepeace Thackeray, chapter 68, in The History of Pendennis. […], volumes (please specify |volume=I or II), London: Bradbury and Evans, […], published 1849–1850

[…] the porter at the rail-road had seen a scuffle; or when he found it was likely to bring him in as a witness, then it might not have been a scuffle, only a little larking […]

1855, Elizabeth Gaskell, chapter 35, in North and South‎