boak
/bəʊk/
boak verb: to burp.
Verb
boak (third-person singular simple present boaks, present participle boaking, simple past and past participle boaked)
- To burp.
- To retch or vomit.
- — God sake... god sake... Mr Houston repeated as Mrs Houston boaked and I made a pathetic effort to mop some of the mess back into the sheets.1994 [1993], Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting, London: Minerva, →ISBN, page 94
- I was going to boak: I made the window and opened it but most of the sickness hit the window-sill in a heap.1997, Alan Warner, Movern Callar
Proper noun capitalized: Boak
Boak (plural Boaks)
- A surname.
Examples of boak in a sentence
- He’d skipped breakfast—didn’t like the idea of boaking it back up on the flight.1999, Ian Rankin, Black and Blue
- She had to keep stopping to spit gobbits of rising boak into sinks and old tea mugs.2020, Douglas Stewart, Shuggie Bain
Forms of boak
| Verb | |
|---|---|
| third-person singular present | boaks |
| present participle | boaking |
| past participle | boaked |
| past | boaked |
| Proper noun | |
| plural | Boaks |
| alternative form | Boyack |
Origin of boak
From Middle English bolken (“to belch, vomit”), from Old English bealcian (“to belch, utter, bring up, sputter out, pour out, give forth, emit, come forth”), from Proto-Germanic *belkaną (“to belch”), ultimately imitative. Cognate with Dutch balken and bulken (“to bellow”), German bölken (“to roar”). See also belch.
Scottish surname, probably related to boak (“ridge”).
Words formed from boak
- the dry boak
Words that rhyme with boak
Questions about boak
- What does boak mean?
- Boak means to burp.
- How do you use boak in a sentence?
- He’d skipped breakfast—didn’t like the idea of boaking it back up on the flight.
- What part of speech is boak?
- Boak can be a verb or a proper noun.
- How do you pronounce boak?
- Boak is pronounced /bəʊk/.
- What is the past tense of boak?
- The past tense of boak is boaked.
Words near boak in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: boak (page history and authors); Boak (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-boak.wav.
Cite this entry: “boak.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/boak. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.