Bloke

How to spell bloke

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce bloke

What does bloke mean?

1. nounAn informal word for an ordinary man or fellow.

Bloke in a sentence

• The bloke next door offered to lend me his ladder.

• Some bloke at the pub recommended this brand of cider.

Where does bloke come from?

Language of origin: Unknown

Bloke is a piece of informal British slang meaning an ordinary man, and its exact origin is genuinely uncertain, which is why etymologists hedge their bets. The word surfaced in English in the early to middle 1800s, first in the language of the streets and the criminal underworld, and dictionaries of slang from that period record it with no settled source. One popular suggestion traces it to Shelta, the secret cant of Irish Travellers, where a similar word meant 'man'; another points to Romani 'loke' or to the Dutch and Celtic strands that fed into thieves' cant. Because none of these can be proven, the safest statement is simply that it grew up as colloquial speech and stuck. The spelling is mercifully phonetic, rhyming with 'joke' and 'smoke', so the only real trap is remembering the silent final 'e'.

How the word is built

• bloke (a single unanalysable root; no prefix or suffix)