Stoked

How to spell stoked

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce stoked

What does stoked mean?

1. adjectiveExtremely pleased, enthusiastic, or excited about something.
2. verbPast tense of stoke: to have fed fuel into a fire or furnace to keep it burning.

Stoked in a sentence

• adjective

  The whole team felt stoked about the upcoming trip to the coast.

• verb

  The engineer stoked the boiler steadily through the long night shift.

• adjective

  She was absolutely stoked when the promotion finally came through.

• verb

  He stoked the wood stove until the cabin grew warm.

Where does stoked come from?

Language of origin: Dutch

This word traces back to the Dutch verb stoken, which meant to push, poke, or feed fuel into a fire. English first borrowed the agent noun stoker in the seventeenth century for the worker who shovelled coal into a furnace, and the verb stoke was then formed backwards from it, a process called back-formation. The literal sense stayed close to its Dutch root: to keep a fire burning by adding fuel and stirring the coals. From there English speakers naturally extended it to mean building up any kind of energy, so a person could be stoked, meaning fired up. The lively modern slang sense of being thrilled or eagerly excited grew out of American and Australian surf culture in the 1960s, where to be stoked meant to be glowing with enthusiasm, much like a well fed fire.

How the word is built

• stoke (to feed or stir a fire)
• -ed (past tense / past participle suffix)