As a proper noun, The Kirk is an informal name for the Church of Scotland, the country's national church. The Kirk of Scotland was in official use as the name of the Church of Scotland until the 17th century, and still today the term is frequently used in the press and everyday speech, though seldom in the Church's own literature. However, Kirk Session is still the standard term in church law for the court of elders in the local congregation, both in the Church of Scotland and in any of the other Scottish Presbyterian denominations.
High Kirk is the term sometimes used to describe a congregation of the Church of Scotland which uses a building which was a cathedral prior to the Reformation. As the Church of Scotland is not governed by bishops, it has no cathedrals in the episcopal sense of the word. In more recent times, the traditional names have been revived, so that in many cases both forms can be heard: Glasgow Cathedral, as well as the High Kirk of Glasgow, and St. Giles' Cathedral, as well as the High Kirk of Edinburgh. The term High Kirk should, however, be used with some caution. Several towns have a congregation known as the High Kirk which were never pre-Reformation cathedrals. Examples include:
Dundee, where the High Kirk is not the historic Dundee Parish Church known as St Mary's, but St David's;
Paisley where there were former congregations and parishes surrounding three churches: the High Kirk, the Middle Kirk and the Laigh Kirk, the Middle Kirk no longer existing as a religious institution and none of the three names referred to Paisley's historic Abbey;
The first court of Presbyterian polity where the Elders of a particular congregation gather as a Session or meeting to govern the spiritual and temporal affairs of the church.
Like words meaning "church" in other languages, kirk is found as an element in many placenames in Scotland and England, and in countries with large British expatriate communities. Examples include Falkirk, Kirkwall or numerous Kirkhills in Scotland, and Kirkstall, Ormskirk, Kirkby, Kirklees, and so forth in England, and Newkirk, Oklahoma in the United States. What may be slightly surprising is that this element is found not only in place names of Anglo-Saxon origin, but also in some Southern Scottish names of Gaelic origin such as Kirkcudbright. Here, the Gaelic element cil- might be expected. The reason appears to be that kirk was borrowed into Galwegian Gaelic, though it was never part of Gaelic as it was spoken in the Highlands or Ireland. The letter 'C' tended to be used instead of 'K' in Old Goidelic languages, as the letter k does not appear in the earliest Goidelic Alphabet and also in some of the other existing Insular Celtic languages in general, but in later modified forms of the languages tended to be borrowed in some cases for names or place names. When the element appears in placenames in the former British empire, a distinction can be made between those where the element is productive and those where it is merely transferred. Kirkland, Washington is an exception, being named after English settler Peter Kirk. The element kirk is also used in anglicisations of continental European place names originally formed from one of the continental Germanic cognates. Thus Dunkirk is a rendering of an original standard Dutch form, Duinkerke.
Personal names
Kirk is also in use as both a surname and a male forename. For lists of these, see Kirk and Kirk, and also Kirkby. Parallels in other languages are far rarer than with placenames, but English Church can also be a surname.
