Word.ws English Dictionary

hoky-poky

hoky-poky adjective: fraudulent; trickish. Also the alternative form of hokey pokey.

Adjective

hoky-poky (comparative more hoky-poky, superlative most hoky-poky)

  1. Fraudulent; trickish.
    • Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!1851 November 14, Herman Melville, “chapter 119, The Candles”, in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, →OCLC
    • And that hoky-poky owner smiled a grim and sordid smile / As he saw his vessel vanish round a corner of the isle !1876, Benjamin D-------, his little dinner

Also used as

hoky-poky is also the alternative form of hokey pokey.

Forms of hoky-poky

comparativemore hoky-poky
superlativemost hoky-poky

Questions about hoky-poky

What does hoky-poky mean?
Hoky-poky means fraudulent; trickish.
What part of speech is hoky-poky?
Hoky-poky is an adjective.

Words near hoky-poky in the dictionary

  1. Hokuriku
  2. hokus-pokus
  3. Hokuto
  4. hokutolite
  5. hoky
  6. hoky-poky
  7. Hokyen
  8. hokyo
  9. hokyos
  10. HoL
  11. Hol Hamoed

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hoky-poky (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: “hoky-poky.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/hoky-poky. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.