Dictionary

moke en · NOUN

Pronunciation

• /məʊk/ (Received-Pronunciation)
• (Southern-England) audio
• /moʊk/ (General-American)

Etymology

Unknown. In the sense of a variety performer, comes from "The Lively Moke" (or "Musical Moke"), an 1860s blackface song, dance and multi-instrumental routine popularized by Johnny Thompson, William J. "Billy" Ashcroft and others.

Meanings

1. (colloquial, dialectal) A donkey.
   • […] We do but as the world does; and a girl in our society accepts the best party which offers itself, just as Miss Chummey, when entreated by two young gentlemen of the order of costermongers, inclines to the one who rides from market on a moke, rather than to the gentleman who sells his greens from a handbasket. 1854, Arthur Pendennis [pseudonym; William Makepeace Thackeray], The Newcomes: Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family, volume (please specify |volume=I or II), London: Bradbury and Evans, […], →OCLC:
   • "[…] Look at him! An old moke with long ears!” 1956, C. S. Lewis, chapter 7, in The Last Battle, Collins, published 1998:
   • Some five years before, the Colonel Commanding […] had asked them why the three stars should he, a Colonel of the Line, command a dashed nursery for double-dashed bottle-suckers who put on condemned tin spurs and rode qualified mokes at the hiatused heads of forsaken Black Regiments. [1889 January], Rudyard Kipling, “Only a Subaltern”, in Under the Deodars (A. H. Wheeler & Co.’s Indian Railway Library; no. 4), Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh: A[rthur] H[enry] Wheeler & Co.; London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, […], →OCLC, pages 83–84:
2. (obsolete) The mesh of a net, or of anything resembling a net.
   • Any trawl-net, whereof the moak holdeth not five inches size throughout. 1604, Hastings Corporate Record:
3. (US, archaic, derogatory, ethnic, slang, slur) A black person.
   • I don't like the Minstrel folks, and I doesn't care for the endmen's jokes; I has no use for the musical mokes, and I don't like a circus clown […] 1904, William Jerome, When Mr. Shakespeare comes to town:
4. (dated, qualifier:theatrical slang) A performer, such as a minstrel, who plays on several musical instruments.
5. A stupid person; a dolt.
   • Whoever infers that money is not happiness, is either a truist or a moke. 1868, Punch, volumes 54-55, page 231:
6. British small utility vehicle (styled "MOKE").
7. (US, slang) A mixture of cannabis and tobacco, especially smoked from a bong or water pipe.

Forms