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| Word | Meaning | Eponym |
| kafkaesque | Irrational and terrifying. | Franz Kafka (1883-1924), Czech author of bizarre, labrynthine, terrifying stories. |
| kaiser | A German king or emperor. | A Germanic variation of Caesar. (See also czar and tsar.) |
| kayser | A measure of wave length equal to the wavelength divided by a centimeter. | Heinrich Gustav Johannes Kayser (1853-1940), German physicist known for his work in sound and spectrum analysis. |
| kelvin | A unit of absolute temperature equal to 1/273.16 of the absolute temperature of the triple point of water. | William Thomson Kelvin, 1st Baron Kelvin (1824-1907), the Scottish physicist who developed the Kelvin temperature scale of temperature. |
| kleenex | A soft facial tissue. | A trademark of a dispensable tissue owned by the Kimberley-Clark company. |
| klieg light |
A carbon arc lamp used in movie-making. | John H. (1869-1959) and Anton T. Kleigl (1872-1927), American motion picture lighting experts. |
| klondike | A card-game played alone, the object being to see how many cards can be laid on a row of aces, following sequence and suit. | Named for the Klondike, the river and region around it in the Yukon territory, Canada, the scene of a gold-rush of 1896. |
| knickers | 1. (US) Pants with legs cut off and gathered just below the knee, often worn by golfers. 2. (UK) Women's underpants. | Short for knickerbockers, for the family Knickerbocker in the fictitious History of New York by Washington Irving (1783-1859), shown wearing baggy pants with legs gathered just below the knee in the illustrations by George Cruikshank. |
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