Andres from San Diego, California, wonders: Why do we refer to jail as the pokey? The term, along with its variant pogie or pogey, likely goes back to a word for workhouse, a prison where people worked as part of their sentence, much like debtors’ prison. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Pokey Means Jail”
Hi there, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Andres from San Diego, California.
Andres, welcome.
So my question is, where did the term pokey come from?
And pokey is when people refer to like a prison or a jail, you know, people say like, oh, I was in the pokey for a couple of nights. Where’d you run across it?
So actually, it’s funny. I was listening to this guy that I follow on the Internet. He used to be a bank robber in the 80s.
And I don’t hear many people say the term pokey anymore. I used to hear it when I was younger, like with my uncles and stuff like that.
But he referred to jail as pokey, and it kind of just brought back memories. I was like, I wonder where that came from.
There’s a little bit of mystery in it, like so many words. We don’t know the full story.
But it probably goes back to a word known as pokey, which is maybe familiar to you, and I’ll get into that in a little bit, which meant a workhouse or a poorhouse.
Those two words might not be very well known these days. A workhouse was a prison where you worked as part of your sentence. You did manual labor usually.
And a poorhouse was a place, a similar place, where you worked off a debt. Or maybe it used to be common if you owed money and couldn’t pay it, you were imprisoned.
Now, this is not allowed anymore, but at the time it was. And those were known as pogies as well.
That word in turn, we’re not really sure where it comes from. But there’s another word that you may know, which is the adjective pokey, which is spelled without the e, p-o-k-y, which means small or cramped, and it may be related to that.
And so the idea is that a pokey could just be a small or cramped space. And pokey and pokey, you can hear they sound very much alike.
And there’s a lot of interplay between these two words. The pokey for jail with the K first appears a print in the early 1900s, but pogey, referring to a small cramped space, appears in the late 1800s.
There’s a lot of back and forth, a lot of different spellings for these, a lot of oral transmission.
But even now you will hear pokey and pokey both being used to refer to prison in prison slang and prison Argo and different kinds of like the glossaries in the back of these books that people write about their time and their joint and that sort of thing.
And there’s one particular expression that sometimes is kind of unsavory, pogey bait. You’ll hear sometimes it’s used to talk about anything or anyone that might lead someone to commit a crime, especially a sexual one.
So in other words, jail bait. So pogey bait, so that is the same word. In pogey bait is the same word as pokey or pogey to mean a jail.
Anyway, so that’s the most that we know about it.
Well, thank you guys very much for clarifying that.
Yeah, sure.
Thanks for calling.
Thanks for calling.
Take care.
All right.
Thank you guys.
Have a great day.
