/kɑːkt ɪt/
[phrasal verb] An informal, chiefly British and Australian expression meaning to die. It can also mean to break down or stop working completely, used especially about machines.
This casual slang for dying traces back to a Viking word about the crushing weight of worry and burden.
The story of 'carked it' begins in the frozen north, with the Old Norse word 'karka', meaning to be burdened, to feel pressed down, or to choke. The Norse settlers who came to Britain during the Viking Age brought this word with them, and it gradually worked its way into the vocabulary of northern England. From Old Norse 'karka', the word passed into Middle English as 'carken', carrying with it a sense of heaviness, distress, and anxious burden.
In Middle English, 'carken' and its variant 'cark' described a feeling of worry so heavy it was almost physical — the kind of dread that sits on your chest and will not let you breathe. Writers of the 13th and 14th centuries used it to describe the oppressive weight of grief or care. The word was a close cousin of the Old North French 'carkier', meaning to load or burden, which itself came from a Late Latin root 'carricare', meaning to load a cart or vehicle — the same root that gave English 'charge' via Old French 'chargier', and 'cargo' via Spanish 'cargo'.
By the 16th and 17th centuries, 'cark' had settled into English as both a noun and a verb, meaning heavy anxiety or to weigh upon someone with worry. You can find it in the works of poets and playwrights of the era, used with a kind of gloomy, almost poetic heaviness. The phrase 'carking care' was a common literary combination, describing the sort of relentless worry that grinds a person down over time.
The leap from 'to burden with worry' to 'to die' is not as strange as it might seem. In many languages and dialects, words associated with being crushed, choked, or overwhelmed naturally slide toward meaning death — the ultimate form of being finished off. By the 19th century, in British dialect and then in Australian slang, 'cark' or 'cark it' had evolved to mean to die, with the sense of finally succumbing to the weight of existence. Australia, in particular, embraced the phrase with enthusiasm, and it became a fixture of irreverent Australian English, where death is often spoken about with blunt, darkly comic informality.
Today, 'carked it' is most at home in British and Australian informal speech. It is used both for people who have died and for objects — especially machines — that have broken beyond repair. There is something fitting in that dual use: the word that once described a burden too heavy to carry now describes the moment when anything, human or mechanical, simply cannot carry on any further.