Did you know?
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.”
Examples of coax in a Sentence
Michael Silver, New York Times, 29 Apr. 2025
Collectively, these voices are coaxed by Cockerell, who has a keen ear and fine sense of timing, into becoming some of recent literature’s most compelling narrators.
—Kathryn Schulz, New Yorker, 28 Apr. 2025
Justin Chang, The New Yorker, 12 Mar. 2025
In fact, scientists suspect that the magnetosphere coaxes Triton’s energetic particles to cross over to Neptune’s atmosphere and excite auroral flares on the planet.
—Shi En Kim, Smithsonian Magazine, 5 Nov. 2024
See All Example Sentences for coax
Cite this Entry
“Coax.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/coax. Accessed 9 May. 2025.
Copy Citation
Share