hooky

• IPA^(key): /ˈhʊki/

• Audio (US):

  (file)

• Homophones: hookey, hookie
• Rhymes: -ʊki

Attested in 1848 in New York City. Most likely from Dutch hoekje (“nook, corner; 'spot to hide' in hide-and-seek”). Formerly, "hoekje spelen" could be used to mean "to play hide-and-seek", though the common term for the game nowadays is verstoppertje.

hooky (uncountable)

1. Absence from school or work; truancy. (Can we add an example for this sense?)

   Synonyms: see Thesaurus:truancy

   Let's play hooky and go to the mall.

   • 2006, Noire [pseudonym], Thug-A-Licious: An Urban Erotic Tale, New York, N.Y.: One World, Ballantine Books, →ISBN, page 101:

     I was already two years late getting to college. I was twenty, not eighteen like most people who were about to graduate. All that hooky playing, stealing, and getting sent to juvenile jails had set me way back.

From hook +‎ -y.

hooky (comparative hookier, superlative hookiest)

1. Full of hooks (in any sense).

   Sew the hooky half of the Velcro on the inner side so that it doesn't pick up fluff.

   • 2020 November 9, Gwen Ihnat, “With McCartney III, Paul McCartney offers lessons from a legendary life”, in The A.V. Club:

     At least the mostly instrumental kickoff “Long Tailed Winter Bird” offers a hooky acoustic guitar riff you can’t blame McCartney for hanging on to as long as he does.

2. Shaped like or resembling a hook; hooked.
3. (UK, slang) Dodgy; crooked; illicit.
   • 2015, Marnie Riches, The Girl Who Wouldn't Die:

     Start a thing in the street and attract attention to bags full of hooky gear? No. She was smarter than that.

   • 2016, Alan Tootill, Cole and the Clairvoyant, page 45:

     So I decided to put on my seediest voice and leer, and go round offering the traders the Cole line in cheap hooky goods.

• hokyo