German words ending in -ik

-ik came from Greek through Latin, and what it names is a field. Die Musik, die Politik, die Technik, die Physik, die Statistik, die Kritik. English took the same set and wrote it with -ic or -ics, so music, politics, technique, physics, statistics. When the English word names a field, the German one is die.

The sense has stretched since. Die Fabrik is a factory and die Klinik is a clinic, and neither one is a field. The ending holds anyway. That is a good sign: it behaves like a suffix with a gender, not like a category that happens to have one.

The breaks in this deck each have a story, and none of them undermines the rule. Der Streik is a strike, taken from English, and it never had anything to do with the Greek ending it now resembles. Das Plastik is the material, and it is the one to be careful with, because die Plastik is a sculpture. Same letters, two words, and the article follows which one you mean.

Guess die and you will usually be right, but this ending misses more often than the others on this list, so the exception list sits on the page rather than in a footnote. German holds a few more of the same sort: der Katholik is a person, das Mosaik is a thing and der Pazifik is a place, and none of the three is the name of a field.