hoke

• IPA^(key): /hoʊk/

• Audio (Southern England)

  (file)

• Rhymes: -əʊk

From Middle English hoke, from Old English hōc.

hoke (plural hokes)

1. (obsolete) Alternative form of hook
   • 1530 January 27 (Gregorian calendar), W[illiam] T[yndale], transl., [The Pentateuch] (Tyndale Bible), Malborow [Marburg], Hesse: […] Hans Luft [actually Antwerp: Johan Hoochstraten], →OCLC, Exodus xxviij:[13–14], folio LI, recto:

     And thou ſhalt make hokes off golde and two cheynes off fine golde: lynkeworke and wrethed, and faſten the wrethed cheynes to the hokes.

• hoked (adjective)

From hokum.

hoke (third-person singular simple present hokes, present participle hoking, simple past and past participle hoked)

1. (slang) To ascribe a false or artificial quality to; to pretend falsely to have some quality or to be doing something, etc.
   • 1976 September, Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift, New York, N.Y.: Avon Books, →ISBN, page 126:

     Sewell an anti-Semite? Nonsense. It suited Humboldt to hoke that up.

   • 1993, Reed Whittemore, Jack London: Six Literary Lives, page 70:

     He even checked the Thomas Cooke & Son travel people about how to get to the East End (here he was hoking a bit), learning that they were ready to advise him on how to journey to any point in the world except the East End. Then he hailed a cab and found (here he was hoking further) that the cab driver didn't know how to get there either.

   • 1999, David Lewis, 15: Humean Supervenience Debugged: Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology, volume 2, page 228:

     If we define partitions of alternative cases by means of ingeniously hoked-up properties, we can get the principle to say almost anything we like.

   • 2008, Terry Penner, “12: The Forms and the Sciences in Socrates and Plato”, in Hugh H. Benson, editor, A Companion to Plato, page 179:

     If it be asked how we come to talk about them, the answer is: for purposes of rejecting these misbegotten creatures of sophistic imaginations, “hoked up” with such things as interest, strength, and the like, which do exist, although only outside of these combinations.

• hoke up
• hokey

hoke (plural hokes)

1. Something contrived or artificial.

From the root of holk (“hollow cavity”). Compare Scots howk.

hoke (third-person singular simple present hokes, present participle hoking, simple past and past participle hoked)

1. (Ireland) To scrounge, to grub.
   • 1987, Seamus Heaney, Terminus: The Haw Lantern, published 2010, unnumbered page:

     When I hoked there, I would find / An acorn and a rusted bolt

   • 2000, John Kelly, The Little Hammer, unnumbered page:

     We met when I was hoking about in the rocks – just the sort of thing a virtual only child does to put in the day.

• okeh

hoke f (definite singular hoka, indefinite plural hoker or hokor, definite plural hokene or hokone)

1. (pre-1938) alternative form of hake