moke

Unknown. In the sense of a variety performer, comes from "The Lively Moke" (or "Musical Moke"), an 1860s blackface song, dance and multi-instrumental routine popularized by Johnny Thompson, William J. "Billy" Ashcroft and others.

• (UK) IPA^(key): /məʊk/

moke (plural mokes)

1. (colloquial, dialectal) A donkey.
   • 1855, William Makepeace Thackeray, The Newcomes, Chapter,

     " […] We do but as the world does; and a girl in our society accepts the best party which offers itself, just as Miss Chummey, when entreated by two young gentlemen of the order of costermongers, inclines to the one who rides from market on a moke, rather than to the gentleman who sells his greens from a handbasket."

   • 1888, Rudyard Kipling, ‘Only a Subaltern’, Under the Deodars, Folio Society 2005, p. 68:

     the Colonel [...] had asked them why the three stars should he, a colonel of the Line, command a dashed nursery for double-dashed bottle-suckers who put on condemned tin spurs and rode qualified mokes at the hiatused heads of forsaken Black Regiments.

   • 1956, C. S. Lewis, The Last Battle, Collins, 1998, Chapter 7,

     " […] Look at him! An old moke with long ears!”

2. A mesh of a net, or of anything resembling a net.

   (Can we find and add a quotation of Halliwell to this entry?)

3. (US derogatory slang, ethnic slur, now rare) A black person.
   • 1904: "When Mr. Shakespeare comes to town" by William Jerome

     I don't like the Minstrel folks, and I doesn't care for the endmen's jokes;
     I has no use for the musical mokes, and I don't like a circus clown ...

4. A stupid person; a dolt.
5. (dated, theatrical slang) A performer, such as a minstrel, who plays on several musical instruments.

moki +‎ -e

moke

1. mockingly