Word.ws English Dictionary

off the hooks

off the hooks prepositional phrase: unhinged; disturbed; disordered.

Prepositional phrase

  1. (colloquial) Unhinged; disturbed; disordered.
    • Or was Erskine out of his mind? And he himself Watt was he not perhaps slightly deranged? And Mr. Knott himself, was he quite right in his head? Were they not all three perhaps a little off the hooks?1953, Samuel Beckett, Watt, [Paris]: Olympia Press, →OCLC
    • In the evening, by water, to the Duke of Albemarle, whom I found mightily off the hooks that the ships are not gone out of the river.1665 June 4 (date written; Gregorian calendar), Samuel Pepys, Mynors Bright, transcriber, “May 26th, 1665”, in Henry B[enjamin] Wheatley, editor, The Diary of Samuel Pepys […], volume V, London...
  2. (archaic, colloquial) Superseded.
  3. (archaic, colloquial) Dead.

Questions about off the hooks

What does off the hooks mean?
Off the hooks means unhinged; disturbed; disordered.
What part of speech is off the hooks?
Off the hooks is a prepositional phrase.

Words near off the hooks in the dictionary

  1. off the heezy
  2. off the hinges
  3. off the hizzle
  4. off the hizzy
  5. off the hook
  6. off the hooks
  7. off the horn
  8. off the lay
  9. off the mark
  10. off the market
  11. off the nut

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: off the hooks (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: “off the hooks.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/off_the_hooks. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.