poke

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for poke is 4 letters long, classified as averb, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /pəʊk/. Corpus data places it at rank #13,037 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.Wiktionary records 9 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 5 documented wrong-spelling variants for poke, with forms such as "opke", "pkoe", and "poek". Each variant represents a distinct typo pattern that appears often enough in corpora to be worth flagging, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "pop", "pot", "pos", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: 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. Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is poke, spelled P-O-K-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.