poke
/poʊk/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.60 in modern English
10
Scrabble Score
4
Letters
1
Syllables
4
Unique Chars
Meaning
verb
To notify (another user) of activity on social media or an instant messenger.
Informal; Transitive verb
Example Sentences
- "Ward showed good pace to beat the advancing Reina to the ball and poke a low finish into the corner."
- "I poked about in the rubble, trying to find my lost keys."
- "The 200 UDGs may be used either by paging between 10 sets of 20 UDGs or, alternatively, by displaying 96 different characters by poking the system variable CHARS with 256 less than the starting address of your graphics."
- "If you try to poke a value outside this range into a byte, Basic will beep you with an ILLEGAL QUANTITY error."
- "to poke an ox"
- "I find from their testimony , which was not contradicted , that the placing of such a poke upon such a colt in such a pasture is not considered dangerous, and that farmers are accustomed so to poke their own horses, but that they are not accustomed to put pokes on or 'hamper' horses owned by other persons without the authorization of the owner."
Etymology
From Middle English poken, perhaps from Middle Dutch poken or Middle Low German poken, both from Proto-West Germanic *pukōn or similar, which is itself of uncertain origin, but may be from an imitative Proto-Germanic root *puk-. Doublet of poach. Compare Nordic cognates Swedish påka (“to poke, muck with a stick”), påk (“club, limb; dagger”), pykel (“small poker”), dialectal Norwegian pauka (“to walk stomping, etc”), pauk (“weak, slow person”). Central European noun-cognates refer to “dagger, bad knife, poker (for a fireplace)”, with analog verbs. To a Proto-Germanic *pauk-, *puk-, meanig, “to stick, muck with a stick”.
Origin
- Source language: Middle English
- First known use: First attested in the early 13th c.
Word Breakdown
- Root: poken, *pukōn, -, poke, *pokō
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /poʊk/
- British English: /pəʊk/
Usage
- Dated
- Transitive verb
- Informal
- Slang
- American usage
- Uncountable
- Colloquial
Subject
Wiktionary places this term in Food.