Word.ws English Dictionary

poke the bear

poke the bear verb: to deliberately aggravate somebody, especially somebody in a position of power or authority.

Verb

poke the bear (third-person singular simple present pokes the bear, present participle poking the bear, simple past and past participle poked the bear)

  1. (US, idiomatic) To deliberately aggravate somebody, especially somebody in a position of power or authority.
    • Throughout my training I witnessed several doctors run out of town because their honesty and outspokenness began to poke the bear.2012, Marty Makary, Unaccountable, Bloomsbury Publishing USA, →ISBN, page 17
    • His advice to Zuckerberg, the Times later reported, was “Don’t poke the bear”—avoid incurring the wrath of Trump and his supporters.2020 October 12, Andrew Marantz, “Why Facebook Can’t Fix Itself”, in The New Yorker, archived from the original on 01 Nov 2020
  2. (idiomatic, slang) To deliberately anger Russia or the Russian government.

poke the bear meaning in Bengali

poke the bear in Bengali

ইচ্ছাকৃতভাবে কাউকে উত্তেজিত করা, ইচ্ছাকৃতভাবে রাশিয়া, রুশ সরকারকে রাগানো

Forms of poke the bear

third-person singular presentpokes the bear
present participlepoking the bear
past participlepoked the bear
pastpoked the bear

Origin of poke the bear

The second sense refers to the use of bears to represent Russia, as a shortening of the idiom "poke the Russian bear" (to anger or threaten Russia and start a war with Russia).

Questions about poke the bear

What does poke the bear mean?
Poke the bear means to deliberately aggravate somebody, especially somebody in a position of power or authority.
What is poke the bear in Bengali?
Poke the bear in Bengali is ইচ্ছাকৃতভাবে কাউকে উত্তেজিত করা, ইচ্ছাকৃতভাবে রাশিয়া, রুশ সরকারকে রাগানো. See Poke the bear meaning in Bengali.
What part of speech is poke the bear?
Poke the bear is a verb.
What is the past tense of poke the bear?
The past tense of poke the bear is poked the bear.

Words near poke the bear in the dictionary

  1. poke one's nose into
  2. poke out
  3. poke salad
  4. poke salads
  5. poke someone's eye out
  6. poke the bear
  7. poke-a-dot
  8. poke-a-dots
  9. pokeberries
  10. pokeberry
  11. poked

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: poke the bear (page history and authors); poke the bear (Bengali Wiktionary) (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)-Flame, not lame-poke the bear.wav.

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