Joker

How to spell joker

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce joker

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does joker mean?

1. nounA person who makes jokes or behaves in an amusing, not-quite-serious way.
2. nounAn extra playing card in a deck, often used as a wild card.

Joker in a sentence

• The office joker kept everyone laughing through the long meeting.

• She drew the joker and used it as a wild card to complete her hand.

• He was the class joker and rarely took anything seriously.

• Most decks include an extra card called the joker along with the standard fifty-two.

Where does joker come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The base word joke arrived in English in the late 1600s from the Latin iocus, which meant a jest, a game, or wordplay. Roman writers used iocus for light verbal fun, in contrast to ludus, the word for physical play. English took the Latin form, dropped it into informal speech, and added the everyday agent suffix -er to make joker, meaning someone who tells jokes. The playing-card sense, the extra wild card found in a modern deck, developed in American card games in the nineteenth century and spread quickly. The spelling is straightforward and phonetic, with the only real choice being the soft 'j' sound and the unstressed -er ending that sounds like a plain schwa.

How the word is built

• jok- (from joke: a jest)
• -er (agent noun suffix: one who or that which does)