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coke

nounverbnounnouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//kəʊk//
  • United States//koʊk//
  • Australia//koʉk//

Solid residue from roasting coal in a coke oven; used principally as a fuel and in the production of steel and formerly as a domestic fuel.

noun

  1. 1

    Solid residue from roasting coal in a coke oven; used principally as a fuel and in the production of steel and formerly as a domestic fuel.

    The plant should produce approximately 550,000 tons of screened blast furnace coke per year.

    This Messrs. Greener and Straite allege they have effected by taking a quantity of lampblack or powdered charcoal, or of powdered coke, and which has been purified, by the action of electricity from sulphur and any other mixtures, and digesting the same in diluted nitro-muriatic acid.

    At Ho-pi (Hopi) in northern Honan two modern shafts were under construction in 1957-8; but the coal from Ho-pi is expected to be of rather poor quality and so will be mixed with rich coal from P'ing-ting-shan (Pingtingshan) in central Honan for coke making.

Etymology

The origin is not certain. The OED says it is first attested in 1669. The MED has an earlier attestation in the related sense of "charcoal" in 1430: Middle English coke. This may be the same word as colk (“core”) (perhaps from the notion that coke is the core of the material left after it burning), from Old English *colc (“hole, well”), from Proto-West Germanic *kolk, from Proto-Germanic *kulukaz (“a hollow, depression”), from Proto-Indo-European *g(ʷ)el- (“to swallow, devour; gullet”). If so, cognate with Saterland Frisian Kolk (“maelstrom, depression, whirlpool”), West Frisian kolk (“maelstrom, whirlpool”), Dutch kolk (“maelstrom, vortex, whirlpool”), German Kolk (“pothole”).

verb

  1. 1

    To produce coke from coal.

  2. 2

    To turn into coke.

  3. 3

    To add deleterious carbon deposits as a byproduct of combustion.

    In kerolox engines, some of the fuel flow cokes in the engine's cooling passages over time, requiring thorough cleaning prior to reuse.

noun

  1. 1

    informalCocaine.

Etymology

Etymology tree Aymarader. Quechua kukabor. Aymara kukabor. Spanish cocabor. English coca English -ine English cocaineclip. English coke Originated circa 1908 in American English as a clipping of cocaine.

noun

  1. 1

    Variant of CokeinformalAlternative letter-case form of Coke (cola-based soft drink, especially Coca-Cola).

  2. 2

    Variant of CokeinformalAlternative letter-case form of Coke (a serving of cola-based soft drink, especially Coca-Cola).

  3. 3

    Variant of CokeinformalAlternative letter-case form of Coke (any soft drink, regardless of type).

Etymology

Since 1909, by genericization from the name of the American company Coca-Cola and the beverage it produced; the drink was named for two of its original ingredients, coca leaves and cola nut.

Forms

plural
cokes
past tense
coked
past participle
coked
present participle
coking
third person singular
cokes
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).