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/hˈoʊkəs-pˈoʊkəs/ Listen

noun

Hocus-pocus n.

A term used by magicians or conjurers in pretended incantations.

A juggler or trickster. (Archaic)

A magician's trick; a cheat; nonsense.

Obfuscating talk or elaborate but meaningless activity intended to hide a deception or to obscure what is actually happening; verbal misrepresentation intended to take advantage of you in some way.

Synonyms: trickery, slickness, hanky panky, jiggery-pokery, skulduggery, skullduggery.

verb

Hocus-pocus v. t. To cheat. (Colloq.)

See images of 'Hocus-pocus'

Etymology of 'Hocus-pocus'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Hocus-pocus" Quotes from Famous Books

... whole matter were really a hocus-pocus. Suppose that whatever meaning you may choose in your fancy to give to it, the real meaning of the whole was mockery. Suppose it was all ...

— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton

... wish to model myself on my own father who dressed up as a shipmaster for my sake and swindled a slave-dealer out of a girl I was in love with. He felt no shame at going in for hocus-pocus at his time of life, and buying his son's affection, mine, by his kindnesses. These methods of my father's I have resolved ...

— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius

... ideal of the "good" man, prudently abased before the throne of God. The things he chiefly argued for were anti-Christian things—the abandonment of the purely moral view of life, the rehabilitation of instinct, the dethronement of weakness and timidity as ideals, the renunciation of the whole hocus-pocus of dogmatic religion, the extermination of false aristocracies (of the priest, of the politician, of the plutocrat), the revival of the healthy, lordly "innocence" that was Greek. If he was anything in a word, Nietzsche was a Greek born two thousand years too late. His dreams were thoroughly ...

— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche

... those big, glaring diamond things are fit for! Mr. Holmes told me he had replaced all the shoes that disappeared last night, as he took them for the purpose of finding out where the stolen cuff-buttons were by his peculiar hocus-pocus methods, so you can't accuse me of having taken them too. I found my pair of shoes in a corner of my room when I returned there after breakfast. Now will you forgive me? Billie Budd is gone, so I don't suppose there will be any further trouble," the Countess ...

— The Adventures of the Eleven Cuff-Buttons • James Francis Thierry

... while the other papers gnashed their teeth and looked on. Nor was the whole truth told by a long way, but a garbled version about foreign coves who worked the business and bolted, and a doting father who never consented to it—and such a hash-up and hocus-pocus as would have made ...

— The Man Who Drove the Car • Max Pemberton

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