“Zonked,” Meaning Exhausted

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Callie from Western Kentucky University.

What can we do for you, Callie?

Well, I was wondering about the word zonk.

I think it’s spelled Z-O-N-K-E-D.

Zonk?

Yeah, zonk.

As in, like, I’m so exhausted, I’m just zonked after the busy day.

Yeah, yeah.

I was talking to a friend one day, and I said, man, I’m just zonked.

And she just looked at me like I was crazy.

She’s from more up north of Kentucky, and I’m more from the south, near Bowling Green.

I was just wondering if that’s more of a regional word or where does this wacky word come from?

Yeah, zonked isn’t regional. It’s fairly widespread.

I wouldn’t say it’s all that common, but the fact that she didn’t hear of it isn’t because she’s from a different place.

It’s just she hadn’t encountered it yet. Now she has through you, right?

Yeah.

There’s a set of words that mean to be really tired or to be really sick or to be really drunk.

And they all have to do with other words that mean being hit on the head.

So, for example, you might say that you’re conked out, right?

You could be conked on the head so that you pass out,

Or you could be conked out meaning you’re sleeping really heavily.

You could be knocked out.

Oh, yeah, he’s knocked out.

Don’t wake him.

We’re going to let him sleep through the morning, right?

This is the kind of thing you might say around a child.

So there’s a few of these, and zonked is part of that pattern,

And it also rhymes with conked, and I don’t think it’s an accident.

I think there’s some otomatopoeia there.

Happening, the sound of, say, a pipe or a bat hitting a skull in the right place to knock

Somebody out. It’s definitely referring to the physical act of hitting somebody so that they pass

Out. Oh, interesting. I definitely never used it in the context of being drunk. But yeah, I’ve

Always heard the word hitting, especially around older families. Yeah. Yeah, it dates back to the

1950s in both the noun and the verb form. And many of the early uses do have to do with drinking too

Much or doing too many drugs or just indulging too much in something that’s going to leave you

Loopy. And then it kind of transitions by the 1980s to more fully just only being about being

Exhausted, having worked so hard that you’re tired or having no more energy left or being really

Sleepy or just sleeping very heavily so that you can’t be awakened. It reminds me of those words

That you see in comic books, you know, when somebody smacks somebody in the face, you know,

Zonk.

Oh, yeah.

That’s not a bad theory.

If there were a good corpus of comic book writing,

I would look and see if it’s in there earlier than the 1950s

Because it just seems like a perfect match, doesn’t it?

Yeah, it does.

I can just picture it.

So, Kelly, we hope you’re not feeling zonked anymore.

We hope you’re feeling a lot better.

Thank you so much.

Thanks, Kelly.

We appreciate it.

Call us again sometime.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

So, yeah, figuratively, it’s about being tired or sleepy.

But literally, all three of these expressions,

Honked out, zonked out, and knocked out have to do with being hit and passing out from that.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense.

And I use all three of them.

Being knocked unconscious.

Yeah, they’re all familiar to me.

But, you know, you and I have this predicament, which is we fiddle around so much with our own language and our own speech,

We’re never quite sure if we’re good representations of the typical American speakers.

That’s right.

We fiddle around with our own language and everybody else’s.

And we’d love to take your language questions.

Call us 877-929-9673 or send your questions and stories about language to words@waywordradio.org.