Meaning

noun North American songbirds having a yellow breast

noun a songbird that lives mainly on the ground in open country; has streaky brown plumage

noun any of numerous predominantly Old World birds noted for their singing

originUncertain, either * from a northern English dialectal term lake /laik (“to play”) (around 1300, from Old Norse leika (“to play (as opposed to work)”)), with an intrusive -r- as is common in southern British dialects; or * a shortening of skylark (1809), sailors' slang, "play roughly in the rigging of a ship", because the common European larks were proverbial for high-flying; Dutch has a similar…

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 3.0