penker

penker noun: a large marble, usually made of stone or metal, used in the game of marbles.

Noun

penker (plural penkers)

(Northern England, dialectal) A large marble, usually made of stone or metal, used in the game of marbles.
- Wor Geordie's lost his penker(Can we date this quote?), “(Geordie folk song)”
- The 'panker' or 'panker' is a large marble, made of stone or iron. Each boy puts four marbles in a ring, and proceeds to knock them out of the ring with a panker.1896, Frank M. T. Palgrave, A List of Words and Phrases in Every-day Use by the Natives of Hetton-le-Hole in the County of Durham, English Dialect Society, page 34

Here he [Sid Chaplin] learnt to swim and how to jarp Easter eggs; he played with penkers, and shutty ring with glass alleys, and sometimes the men joined in games of tipcat.1987, Sid Chaplin, “The Night of the News”, in Michael Chaplin, Rene Chaplin, editors, In Blackberry Time, Newcastle upon Tyne, Tyne and...
"the first boy threw a penker - much larger than the other marbles (boodies) - the next boy tried to hit it"2004, Bill Griffiths, A Dictionary of North East Dialect, Northumbria University Press, →ISBN, page 326:

What does penker mean?: Penker means a large marble, usually made of stone or metal, used in the game of marbles.
How do you use penker in a sentence?: Here he [Sid Chaplin] learnt to swim and how to jarp Easter eggs; he played with penkers, and shutty ring with glass alleys, and sometimes the men joined in games of tipcat.
What part of speech is penker?: Penker is a noun.
What is the plural of penker?: The plural of penker is penkers.

Adapted from Wiktionary: penker (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.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

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