Stokes

How to spell stokes

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce stokes

What does stokes mean?

1. verbFeeds fuel into a fire or furnace, or prods it to burn more strongly; figuratively, intensifies a feeling or situation.

Stokes in a sentence

• Every winter morning she stokes the wood burner before breakfast.

• The engineer stokes the boiler to keep the steam pressure high.

Where does stokes come from?

Language of origin: Dutch

The verb 'stoke' came into English in the mid-1600s as a back-formation from 'stoker', a worker who tended a furnace, which English borrowed from the Dutch 'stoker'. That noun was built on the Dutch verb 'stoken', meaning 'to poke, to thrust, to feed a fire', and it is distantly related to the same Germanic family that gives us 'stick' and 'stock', all carrying the idea of a thrust or a thing thrust in. The original literal sense was very physical: to push fuel into a furnace or to prod a fire so it burns harder, which is why the word still feels at home around steam engines and boilers. From there it broadened to the figurative 'to encourage or intensify', as in stoking enthusiasm or stoking fear. The form 'stokes' is simply this verb in its third-person singular present, adding the regular -s; the spelling is wholly phonetic, so the only real care needed is keeping the silent-feeling long 'o' and not doubling any letters. As a separate noun, 'stokes' is also the name of the unit of kinematic viscosity, named in honour of the Irish-born physicist Sir George Gabriel Stokes.

How the word is built

• stoke (to feed or poke a fire, from Dutch stoken)
• -s (third-person singular verb ending, or plural noun)