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In days of yore, if you wanted to call someone a sap or a dupe, the word cokes was it, what you wanted, the real thing: to make a cokes of someone was to make a fool of them. This now-obsolete noun is believed to be the source of the verb coax. However, the earliest known sense of the verb, appearing in the late 16th century, was not “to make a fool of” (this meaning came later) but rather something sweeter: “to pet or caress; to treat lovingly.” As such an act of coaxing (or “cokesing”) was sometimes done for personal gain or favor, the word soon came to be used to refer to influencing or persuading people by kind acts or words. By the 19th century, the spelling cokes had fallen out of use, along with the meanings “to make a fool of” and “to treat lovingly.”
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Examples of coax in a Sentence
David Faris, Newsweek, 3 Nov. 2024
Cybercriminals relentlessly launch phishing attacks at employees, trying to coax or trick them into providing their personal information and credentials.
—Ilia Sotnikov, Forbes, 30 Oct. 2024
Shi En Kim, Smithsonian Magazine, 5 Nov. 2024
That warming coaxes mosquitoes toward higher elevations, even as temperatures have historically been too cold for the insects to thrive.
—Zoya Teirstein, Vox, 30 May 2024
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Dictionary Entries Near coax
Cite this Entry
“Coax.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/coax. Accessed 22 Nov. 2024.
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