Definition of "shirk"

the usual makeshift by which they try to shirk difficulties

1826, Julius Hare, Guesses at Truth by Two Brothers

Back in school, you ever get busted for trynna walk and have some administrator tell you / "Son, you can shirk your obligations, / and try to be different from your peers, / but responsibility, your future / is gonna find you!"

1989, “Gonna Find You”, in Operation Ivy (CD), performed by Operation Ivy, Lookout Records

One of the cities shirked from the league.

September 7, 1830, Lord Byron, letter to Mr. Murray

Shapiro and Stiglitz (1984) develop a dynamic model in which firms induce workers to work hard by paying high wages and threatening to fire workers caught shirking.

1992, Robert Gibbons, A Primer in Game Theory, Prentice-Hall, page 107

You that never heard the call of any vocation, […] that shirk living from others, but time from yourselves.

1635, Bishop Rainbow, Sermons

I may add here that, coming as the soldiers did from all avocations and stations in life, these details for fatigue often brought together men few of whom had any practical knowledge of the work in hand; so that aside from the shirks, who could work but would not, there were other who would but could not, at least intelligently.

1887, John Davis Billings, Hardtack and Coffee, Or, The Unwritten Story of Army Life, pages 101–102

A person can have committed shirk in their lifetime and still find forgiveness (especially by saying the Shahada and becoming a Muslim). The concept is that if one dies in this state (as a mushrik, an idolator, one who engages in and does not repent shirk), there is no forgiveness.

2013, James R. White, What Every Christian Needs to Know About the Qur'an, Baker Books