oke

Definition

a bloke or man

View the full definition in the Macmillan Dictionary.

Origin and usage

Oke is a shortening or clipping of ‘okie’, which is a version of ‘outjie’, an Afrikaans word meaning boy or young man, first recorded as being used in English in the 1960s. The first recorded use of oke dates from 1970.

Examples

People sometimes submit nonsense words to the Open Dictionary and when I first saw the submission for oke I thought it was one of these. But I was wrong. Oke might look like a typo but it’s a real word in South African English and it means ‘bloke’; so an equivalent for one meaning of ‘guy‘, which we looked at earlier this week. Like ‘guy’, oke can be used to refer to people generally, not just to men. The entry, including the example ‘So many okes in South Africa love rugby’, was submitted shortly before the Springboks‘ stunning victory in the men’s rugby World Cup, making it very timely indeed. If you want to explore South African English further you can find out more here. And please do continue submitting entries to the Open Dictionary; no nonsense words though, please, and nothing that you’ve made up yourself.