Word.ws English Dictionary

hocussed

hocussed is the simple past and past participle of hocus.

Meaning of hocus

Verb

hocus (third-person singular simple present hocuses or hocusses, present participle hocusing or hocussing, simple past and past participle hocused or hocussed)

  1. To play a trick on, to trick (someone); to hoax; to cheat.
    • […] to contemplate the miseries of a poor Poetick life, or study some well laid plot to Hocus his Landlady into a further credence or belief […]1677, Poor Robin’s Visions, London: Arthur Boldero, Eighth Vision, p. 117
  2. (obsolete) To stupefy (someone) with drugged liquor (especially in order to steal from them).
    • […] but him they intended to disable by a trick then newly introduced amongst robbers, and termed hocussing, i. e., clandestinely drugging the liquor of the victim with laudanum […]1855, Thomas De Quincey, “Three Memorable Murders: A Sequel to ‘Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’”, in The Note Book of an English Opium-Eater, Boston: Ticknor & Fields, page 65
  3. (obsolete) To drug (liquor).
    • […] I think the wine of them two Governors was—I will not say a hocussed wine, but fur from a wine as was elthy for the mind.1864 May – 1865 November, Charles Dickens, chapter 12, in Our Mutual Friend. […], volume I, London: Chapman and Hall, […], published 1865, →OCLC
  4. (obsolete) To adulterate (food).
    • I had a healthy appetite, but the tradition was that all the food was unutterably bad, adulterated, hocussed.1915, Arthur Christopher Benson, “Schooldays”, in Escape and Other Essays, London: Smith, Elder, pages 197–198

See all 8 meanings of hocus

Phrases with hocussed

Questions about hocussed

What is hocussed the simple past and past participle of?
Hocussed is the simple past and past participle of hocus.

Words near hocussed in the dictionary

  1. hocusing-pocusing
  2. hocuspocus
  3. hocuspocused
  4. hocuspocuses
  5. hocuspocusing
  6. hocussed
  7. hocussed and pocussed
  8. hocussed-pocussed
  9. hocusses
  10. hocusses and pocusses
  11. hocusses-pocusses

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hocussed (page history and authors); hocus (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.

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Cite this entry: “hocussed.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/hocussed. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.