Word.ws English Dictionary

no joke

no joke phrase: emphasizing the seriousness or truthfulness of a statement.

Phrase

no joke

  1. Emphasizing the seriousness or truthfulness of a statement.
    • No joke: In February, single copy sales spiked an average 1,116 weekdays and 1,600 on Sundays, an increase Castaneda says can be attributed at least in part to the custody and asylum struggle over the six-year-old Cuban shipwreck survivor.2000, Brandweek - Volume 41, Issues 18-22, page 140
    • Well over a hundred urban warriors who weren't afraid to die had a bone to pick with me. No joke.2011, Dennis Lehane, A Drink Before The War

Noun

no joke

  1. Something that should be taken seriously; not something that should be laughed about.
    • But, sir, it is not a farce to the Canadian people; it is no joke to the Canadian tax-payer. If it is either a farce or a joke, they must foot the bill. No , it is no joke to them; it is something else, and something a great deal worse .1891, Canada. Parliament. House of Commons, Official Reports of the Debates of the House of Commons, page 3743
    • Treason-felony, we repeat, is no joke; but then no more is penal servitude for nine years.1893 January 28, “The Release of Egan”, in The Speaker, volume 7, page 95
  2. (informal) Something that is unusually difficult or painful.
    • In addition, Papa was no doubt influenced by his obsession that life is hard, is meant to be hard, and is no joke at all.1985, William Tsap En Wong, James Kim Min Wong, No Joke, James, page 434
    • There was no joke about it whatsoever. That pregnancy was not an easy one.2011, David P. Simmons, No End of Guilty Creatures, page 77

Examples of no joke in a sentence

  • No joke, I was making $50 a day after tax and working so many hours that I had neither the time nor energy to even think about making music.2022, Johnny Ruffo, No Finish Line:
  • Incompetence was no joke when ( other ) people got killed by incompetence.1929, Crascredo, No Joke:

Synonyms of no joke

Questions about no joke

What does no joke mean?
No joke means emphasizing the seriousness or truthfulness of a statement.
How do you use no joke in a sentence?
No joke, I was making $50 a day after tax and working so many hours that I had neither the time nor energy to even think about making music.
What part of speech is no joke?
No joke can be a phrase or a noun.

Words near no joke in the dictionary

  1. no hymen, no diamond
  2. no idea
  3. no jab, no play
  4. no Jews, no news
  5. no johns
  6. no joke
  7. no joy
  8. no justice, no peace
  9. no kick
  10. no kidding
  11. no kizzy

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: no joke (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: “no joke.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/no_joke. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.