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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.
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Examples of puckish in a Sentence
Nicholas Quah, Vulture, 12 Sep. 2024
Grant, whose eager eyes and puckish smile wooed Renée Zellweger’s Bridget Jones and Julia Roberts’ Anna Scott (Notting Hill), uses his signature charm here to test the bounds of these junior missionaries’ beliefs.
—Lovia Gyarkye, The Hollywood Reporter, 3 Sep. 2019
Far ahead of its time in its satirical targets and its mixing of disparate narrative tones, Turtle Island is a hilarious comic send-up that could only have emerged from Rozier’s puckish imagination.
—Samantha Bergeson, IndieWire, 15 July 2024
Saya Gray: Qwerty II EP [Dirty Hit] Qwerty II concludes Saya Gray’s dual-EP follow-up to her 2022 album, 19 Masters, swirling that record’s puckish R&B into hyperactive alt-pop.
—Madison Bloom, Pitchfork, 29 Mar. 2024
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Dictionary Entries Near puckish
Cite this Entry
“Puckish.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/puckish. Accessed 30 Nov. 2024.
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