Meanings
- pluralplural of hocus-pocus
Maybe it’s just a disease which owes its origin to football, but anyhow—the boys who excel in speed, stamina, and muscle surely do have their share of pre-game hoci-poci.
1941 November 14, Bob Levin, “Grid Stars Adher To Own Peculiar Superstitions”, in The Daily Tar Heel, volume L, number 45, Chapel Hill, N.C., page 1, column 33 more examples
After the various hoci-poci had been achieved, we were led up to the graduate who shared at that time with Elihu Root and “Sunny Jim” Sherman the aura of considerable fame.
1921 November 26, John V[an] A[lstyne] Weaver, “Newspaperdom”, in Brooklyn Daily Eagle, volume 81, number 327, New York, N.Y., page 3, column 1Black-robed judges, ponderous oaths of admission, apprenticeship notions and rigorous bar examinations, professional renunciation of self-advertisement and a hundred lesser hoci-poci characterize the brotherhood.
1945, Public Relations Journal, page 13, column 2I also resent the fact that for an opportunistic politician, the whole country is thrown into mourning with all the mumbo-jumbo, incantations and even the hoci poci, while the 400-odd are offered as statistics.
1968 June 12, Eugene Callaway, “Mumbo-Jumbo”, in The Montgomery Advertiser, number 141, Montgomery, Ala., page 4, column 5
Origin
Formed by changing singular -us to plural -i, as in the Latin second declension.
Full word history & related roots →Cite this entry
hoci-poci. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 4, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/hoci-poci
“hoci-poci.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/hoci-poci. Accessed November 4, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “hoci-poci,” accessed November 4, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/hoci-poci.
Source: hoci-poci on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.