Word.ws English Dictionary

hoke

/hoʊk/

hoke is the alternative form of hook.

Meaning of hook

Noun

hook (plural hooks)

  1. A rod bent into a curved shape, typically with one end free and the other end secured to a rope or other attachment.
    • "If I were a pirate and lost my hand, I would ask them to replace it with a computer mouse rather than a hook. I use a computer mouse all day, and I only use a hook three to five times a day."¶ -Emma Stone¶ On hooks2019 February 19, Clickhole, archived from the original on 14 Jul 2022, This quote is falsely attributed to Emma Stone for humorous effect
  2. A barbed metal hook used for fishing; a fishhook.
  3. Any of various hook-shaped agricultural implements such as a billhook.
    • Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep, / Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook / Spares the next swath and all its twinèd flowers: [...]1819 September 19, John Keats, “To Autumn”, in Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, London: […] [Thomas Davison] for Taylor and Hessey, […], published 1820, →OCLC, stanza 2, page...
  4. The curved needle used in the art of crochet.
  5. The part of a hinge which is fixed to a post, and on which a door or gate hangs and turns.
  6. A loop shaped like a hook under certain written letters, for example, g and j.

See all 69 meanings of hook

Verb (1)

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.
    • Sewell an anti-Semite? Nonsense. It suited Humboldt to hoke that up.1976 September, Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift, New York, N.Y.: Avon Books, →ISBN, page 126
    • 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...1993, Reed Whittemore, Jack London: Six Literary Lives, page 70

Noun

hoke (plural hokes)

  1. Something contrived or artificial.

Verb (2)

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

  1. (Ireland) To scrounge, to grub.
    • When I hoked there, I would find / An acorn and a rusted bolt1987, Seamus Heaney, Terminus: The Haw Lantern, published 2010, unnumbered page
    • ‘[B]ut the raven winging
      darkly over the doomed will have news,
      tidings for the eagle of how he hoked and ate,
      how he and the wolf made short work of the dead.’1999, Seamus Heaney, Beowulf, London: Faber and Faber, page 95

Proper noun capitalized: Hoke

Hoke (plural Hokes)

  1. A surname.

Forms of hoke

Noun
pluralhokes
Verb
third-person singular presenthokes
present participlehoking
past participlehoked
pasthoked
Proper noun
pluralHokes

Origin of hoke

From Middle English hoke, from Old English hōc.

From hokum.

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

Words formed from hoke

Words that rhyme with hoke

42 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about hoke

What does hoke mean?
Hoke means to ascribe a false or artificial quality to; to pretend falsely to have some quality or to be doing something, etc.
What is hoke the alternative form of?
Hoke is the alternative form of hook.
What part of speech is hoke?
Hoke can be a verb, a noun or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce hoke?
Hoke is pronounced /hoʊk/.
What is the past tense of hoke?
The past tense of hoke is hoked.

Words near hoke in the dictionary

  1. Hokchew
  2. Hokchia
  3. Hokchiang
  4. Hokchiu
  5. Hokchius
  6. hoke
  7. Hoke County
  8. hoke up
  9. hoked
  10. hoked up
  11. Hokeday

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hoke (page history and authors); Hoke (page history and authors); hook (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-hoke.wav.

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