hoke

plural hokes

1. alternativeobsoleteAlternative form of hook.

   And thou ſhalt make hokes off golde and two cheynes off fine golde: lynkeworke and wrethed, and faſten the wrethed cheynes to the hokes.

   1530 January 27 (Gregorian calendar), W[illiam] T[yndale], transl., [The Pentateuch] (Tyndale Bible), Malborow [Marburg], Hesse: […] Hans Luft [actually Antwerp: Johan Hoochstraten], →OCLC, Exodus xxviij:[13–14], folio LI, recto

present singular third person hokes · participle present hoking · participle past hoked · past hoked

1. slangTo ascribe a false or artificial quality to; to pretend falsely to have some quality or to be doing something, etc.

   Sewell an anti-Semite? Nonsense. It suited Humboldt to hoke that up.

   1976 September, Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift, New York, N.Y.: Avon Books, →ISBN, page 126

   3 more examples

   He even checked the Thomas Cooke & Son travel people about how to get to the East End (here he was hoking a bit), learning that they were ready to advise him on how to journey to any point in the world except the East End. Then he hailed a cab and found (here he was hoking further) that the cab driver didn't know how to get there either.

   1993, Reed Whittemore, Jack London: Six Literary Lives, page 70

   If we define partitions of alternative cases by means of ingeniously hoked-up properties, we can get the principle to say almost anything we like.

   1999, David Lewis, 15: Humean Supervenience Debugged: Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology, volume 2, page 228

   If it be asked how we come to talk about them, the answer is: for purposes of rejecting these misbegotten creatures of sophistic imaginations, “hoked up” with such things as interest, strength, and the like, which do exist, although only outside of these combinations.

   2008, Terry Penner, “12: The Forms and the Sciences in Socrates and Plato”, in Hugh H. Benson, editor, A Companion to Plato, page 179

plural hokes

1. Something contrived or artificial.

present singular third person hokes · participle present hoking · participle past hoked · past hoked

1. IrelandTo scrounge, to grub.

   When I hoked there, I would find / An acorn and a rusted bolt

   1987, Seamus Heaney, Terminus: The Haw Lantern, published 2010, unnumbered page

   2 more examples

   ‘[B]ut the raven winging darkly over the doomed will have news, tidings for the eagle of how he hoked and ate, how he and the wolf made short work of the dead.’

   1999, Seamus Heaney, Beowulf, London: Faber and Faber, page 95

   We met when I was hoking about in the rocks – just the sort of thing a virtual only child does to put in the day.

   2000, John Kelly, The Little Hammer, unnumbered page

plural Hokes

1. A surname.