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We know Puck as "that merry wanderer of the night," the shape-changing, maiden-frightening, mischief-sowing henchman to the king of the fairies in William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. The Bard drew on English folklore in casting his character, but the traditional Puck was more malicious than the Shakespearean imp; he was an evil spirit or demon. In medieval England, this nasty hobgoblin was known as the puke or pouke, names related to the Old Norse pūki, meaning "devil." (There is no connection to modern English puke.) But it was the Bard's characterization that stuck, and by the time the adjective puckish started appearing regularly in English texts in the 1800s the association was one of impishness, not evil.
Examples of puckish in a Sentence
Randall Colburn, EW.com, 15 Apr. 2025
On Saturday morning, the puckish Bulgarian designer Kiko Kostadinov spooled out architectural overcoats, tunics that called to mind The Legend of Zelda and shirts stamped with Hungarian emblems.
—Jacob Gallagher, New York Times, 25 Jan. 2025
Case in point: Naughty Dog — the studio that made the puckish platformer Crash Bandicoot in 1996 would go on to release classy postapocalyptic thriller The Last of Us 17 years later.
—Lewis Gordon, Vulture, 5 Sep. 2024
With the exception of Whigham’s puckish, entertaining Bridger, the trappers, soldiers, bounty hunters and militiamen feel like extras from one Sam Peckinpah film or another.
—Mike Hale, New York Times, 9 Jan. 2025
See All Example Sentences for puckish
Cite this Entry
“Puckish.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/puckish. Accessed 3 May. 2025.
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