hooker

• (UK) IPA^(key): /ˈhʊk.ə(ɹ)/
• (US) IPA^(key): /ˈhʊk.ɚ/

• Audio (US)

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ʊkə(ɹ)

• hook (“(verb)”) +‎ -er

hooker (plural hookers)

1. One who, or that which, hooks.
2. A small fishing boat.
3. (nautical, slang, derogatory) Any antiquated craft.
   • 1896, Joseph Conrad, An Outcast of the Islands, Part III, Chapter Two,

     […] the poor Flash is gone, and there is an end of it. Poor old hooker. Hey, Almayer? You made a voyage or two with me. Wasn’t she a sweet craft?

   • 1914, Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Mucker‎, HTML edition, The Gutenberg Project, published 2009:

     … for there was scarce one of us that thought the old hooker would weather so long and hard a blow. We were mighty fortunate to come through it so handily.

4. (rugby) A player who hooks the ball out of the scrum with his foot.
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5. A crocheter.
6. (archaic, thieves' cant) A thief who uses a pole with a hook on the end to steal goods.
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   • 1834, Ainsworth, William Harrison, Rookwood‎, volume 2, Oath of the Canting Crew, page 339:

     Suffer none, from far or near, / With their rights to interfere; / No strange Abram, Ruffler crack— / Hooker of another pack—

• (thief): angler, nuthook

• Hooker

Unknown; The "prostitute" sense is the subject of a folk etymology connecting it to US Civil War general General Hooker, but the earliest known use dates to 1835. Less implausibly, it has also been connected to coastal features called hook (“A spit or narrow cape of sand or gravel turned landward at the outer end, such as Sandy Hook in New Jersey, Red Hook in New York”) in the ports of New York and Baltimore. Careful learned inference is not conclusive. See this essay, pp 105ff.

hooker (plural hookers)

1. (US, slang) A prostitute. [from 1845]
2. (slang, dated, 1920s to 1940s) An imprecise measure of alcoholic drink; a "slug" (of gin), or an overlarge gulp.

• (prostitute): See also Thesaurus:prostitute

• Language Hat
• “hooker” in Albert Barrère and Charles G[odfrey] Leland, compilers and editors, A Dictionary of Slang, Jargon & Cant, volume I (A–K), Edinburgh: The Ballantyne Press, 1889–1890, page 39.
• Farmer, John Stephen (1893) Slang and Its Analogues‎, volume 3, pages 334–335

• rehook