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adj.

mid-15c., “turned the wrong way,” from Old Norse afugr “turned backwards, wrong, contrary,” from Proto-Germanic *afug-, from PIE *apu-ko-, from root *apo- “off, away” (see apo-). Obsolete since 17c.
Contemporary Examples

The source says that awk had a “chilly” personality and had a quick-boiling temper.
The Fallout from the AWK Murder Sami Yousafzai, Ron Moreau July 13, 2011

Recently, awk had reportedly had harsh words for Mohammad, calling him a “motherf—-r” in public several times.
The Fallout from the AWK Murder Sami Yousafzai, Ron Moreau July 13, 2011

awk had appointed him as a local police commander who headed some 200 tough gunmen, and who had worked for awk for seven years.
The Fallout from the AWK Murder Sami Yousafzai, Ron Moreau July 13, 2011

In U.S. military and diplomatic circles, he is simply known as awk.
Can Karzai’s Brother Help? Elise Jordan May 8, 2010

Historical Examples

She allus was awk’ard in stays, but she never missed them yet.
Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood George MacDonald

But, oh dear, it’s awk’ard this ‘ere Twelfth bein’ fixed of a Sunday!
The History of “Punch” M. H. Spielmann

Here we met with an incredible number of birds, all of the awk kind before described.
A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 Robert Kerr

“Bill’s considered ruther an awk’ard customer,” remarked Dick.
David Harum Edward Noyes Westcott

Things is awk’ard, and Sir Thomas, they say, isn’t best pleased.
Ayala’s Angel Anthony Trollope

That awk’ard—why, he can’t finish off a glass rod without break-in’ it, or burning himself!
Joyce’s Investments Fannie E. Newberry

1. (Named from the authors’ initials) An interpreted language included with many versions of Unix for massaging text data, developed by Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan in 1978. It is characterised by C-like syntax, declaration-free variables, associative arrays, and field-oriented text processing.
There is a GNU version called gawk and other varients including bawk, mawk, nawk, tawk. Perl was inspired in part by awk but is much more powerful.
Unix manual page: awk(1).
netlib WWW (http://plan9.att.com/netlib/research/index.html). netlib FTP (ftp://netlib.att.com/netlib/research/).
[“The AWK Programming Language” A. Aho, B. Kernighan, P. Weinberger, A-W 1988].
2. An expression which is awkward to manipulate through normal regexp facilities, for example, one containing a newline.
[Jargon File]
(1995-10-06)
awkward