Skip to main content

fike

verb, noun

fike is a verb meaning “To feign; dissemble; flatter” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled F-I-K-E and has one syllable, and it appears about once in every 17 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data).

What does fike mean?

verb

  1. 1

    To feign; dissemble; flatter.

  2. 2

    To move about in a quick, uneasy way; be constantly in motion.

  3. 3

    To give trouble to; vex; perplex.

noun

  1. 1

    Restlessness or agitation caused by trifling annoyance.

  2. 2

    UKAny trifling peculiarity in regard to work which causes unnecessary trouble; teasing exactness of operation.

  3. 3

    obsoleteA fig.

  4. 4

    UKA sore place on the foot.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How do you pronounce fike?

    Fike has one syllable (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).

    Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

    Forms of fike

    • fikes present, singular, he/she/it, plural
    • fiking participle, present
    • fiked participle, past
    • fick
    • fyke

    Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

    How common is fike?

    Fike appears about once in every 17 million words in written English, the 122,704th most frequent word form in the list.

    Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

    Where does fike come from?

    From Middle English fiken (“to feign, dissemble, flatter”), from Old English fician (“to wheedle, flatter”) (also found in compound befician (“to deceive”)), from Proto-West Germanic *fikōn, from Proto-Germanic *fikōną (“to deceive”), from Proto-Indo-European *peyǵ- (“ill-meaning, evil-minded, treacherous, hostile, bad”). Related to Old English ġefic (“fraud, deceit, deception”), Old English fācen (“deceit, fraud, treachery, sin, evil, crime, blemish, fault”), Middle High German veichen (“dissembling, deceit, fraud”), Latin piget (“it irks, it annoys”).

    Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).