This is a common enough word that it’s in all the dictionaries. The New Oxford American Dictionary defines jiggery-pokery as “deceitful or dishonest behavior” and that lines up with all the others.

The reason jiggery-pokery means “dishonest behavior” is explained as coming from a Scottish joukery-pawkery where jouk meant “to dodge or duck” and pawk meant “trick.”

Although we don’t have citations for jiggery-pokery until just over 100 years ago, both joukery and pawkery are cited about 450 years ago as Scottish English words.

The place where jiggery-pokery first surfaced in 1893 was in A glossary of words used in the county of Wiltshire.

I was able to lay electronic hands on this old glossary and it tells us a few things. First of all it was compiled as part of the same larger project that eventually coughed up the Oxford English Dictionary.

Two guys, George Edward Dartnell and the Rev. Edward Hungerford Goddard went around collecting local words from their county. They give credit even to a local gardener who helped out so it really was a grass roots effort. But they were also in contact with the greats of lexicography of the day so it wasn’t just an amateur effort.

Their material went into The English Dialect Dictionary a six volume effort published between 1898 and 1905 and claiming to be

“the complete vocabulary of all dialect words still in use, or known to have been in use during the last two hundred years.”

Dartnell and Goddard worked on their glossary for more than five years and say that it still isn’t complete and urge more work be done. The reason is that even back in the 1890s they felt that local dialect was dying out. As they say:

… thanks, perhaps, to the spread of education, which too often renders the rustic half-ashamed of his native tongue. Good old English as at base it is, for many a word or phrase used daily and hourly by the Wiltshire labourer has come down almost unchanged, even as regards pronunciation, from his Anglo- Saxon fore- fathers, it is not good enough for him now. One here, and another there, will have been up to town, only to come back with a … liberal contempt for the old speech and the old ways.

A question pops into my head as to why a word like jiggery-pokery would find its way into what is now Standard English when other Wiltshire words did not.

One possible answer I think might be that as Dartnell and Goddard imply jiggery-pokery may be older than what’s suggested by what we’ve found in written records.

The County of Wiltshire is directly west of London so a fair pace from Scotland. For Wiltshire “rustics” to have picked up this word, it’s more likely that it was already in use in slightly different forms all across Britain than that someone imported the expression from Scotland.

That would explain too why it was more easily adopted into Standard English since a very broad range of people would have heard something like it as they grew up.

Before I go I’m very happy to let you know that beginning tomorrow, Thursday episodes of podictionary will be carried on the Oxford University Press blog. This means that if you want to hear Thursday episodes you’ll need to subscribe to the OUP blog feed specific to podictionary. That URL is

http://blog.oup.com/category/reference/podictionary/feed/

We will also be adding this Thursday series to the iTunes store podcast directory. We haven’t gotten that done yet though.