Q: I often hear the term “tuckered out,” but not in any other tenses. My dictionary says “tucker” is a dress. I’m confused. What does “tuckered out” mean, where did it come from, and what are its other tenses?
A: The story begins back in Anglo-Saxon days, when the verb “tuck” (tucian in Old English) meant to punish, mistreat, or torment.
The earliest example in the Oxford English Dictionary is from the Old English Boethius, a late ninth- or early tenth-century translation of De Consolatione Philosophiae (“The Consolation of Philosophy”), a sixth-century Latin treatise by the Roman philosopher Boethius:
“Lustlice hi woldon lætan þa rican hi tucian æfter hiora agnum willan” (“Gladly would they [the unwise] let the powerful torment them at will”).
The “punish” sense of “tuck” is now obsolete, the OED says, but in the Middle English of the late 14th century, the verb came to mean “to pull or gather up and confine” loose garments—a sense we use now when we “tuck in” our shirttails or “tuck in” a child at bedtime.
The dictionary’s earliest citation for the new meaning is from the story of Dido, the Queen of Carthage, in Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women (circa 1385).
When Dido meets Aeneas and Achates in the wilderness, she asks if they’ve seen her sisters, out hunting “i-tukkid vp with arwis” (“[their skirts] tucked up with arrows”).
This “gather up” meaning of “tuck” apparently led to the use of “tucked up” to describe a tired horse or dog—a sense the OED defines as “having the flanks drawn in from hunger, malnutrition, or fatigue; hence, tired out, exhausted.”
The dictionary’s first citation, which we’ve expanded here, describes the wild pariah dog: “They generally are very thin, and of a reddish-brown colour, with sharp-pointed ears, deep chest, and tucked-up flanks” (from The Dog, 1845, by the English veterinary surgeon William Youatt).
Meanwhile, the related verb “tucker” appeared in the US with the sense of “to tire, to weary.” The OED says it’s usually seen in the phrasal verb “tucker out,” especially its past participle “tuckered out,” meaning “worn out, exhausted.”
The earliest example we’ve seen, which uses the present participle (“tuckering”), is from an article in a New York literary journal about a shark hunt:
“There’s no sich thing as tuckering out your raal white shark: he’s all bone and sinners [sinews]” (The Knickerbocker, January 1836).
The earliest example we’ve found for the past participle is from an anonymous short story, “The Book Agent,” in The Rhode-Island Republican (Newport, RI), June 22, 1836:
“ ‘I thank you a thousand times,’ said the stranger, ‘I reckoned to have got to the tavern by sun down, but I havn’t, and as I am prodigiously tuckered out, I’ll stay, and thank ye into the bargain,’ following the clergyman into the house.”
The online Cambridge Dictionary has recent examples of the usage in the present tense (“it tuckers you out”) and in the present perfect (“the puppy has tuckered herself out”).
We haven’t been able to find an example of “tucker” used to mean a dress. However, it’s a now-obsolete term for a strip of gathered or pleated material, like a ruffle or frill, sewn in or around the top of a bodice (the upper part of a dress).
The earliest OED citation, which we’ve expanded here, is from a book about heraldry that defines “tucker” as “a narrow piece of Cloth Plain or Laced, which compasseth the top of a Womans Gown about the Neck part” (The Academy of Armory, 1688, by Randle Holme).
This sense of “tucker” is seen, especially in British English, in the expression “one’s best bib and tucker,” meaning “one’s smartest clothes.”
In another clothing sense, the noun “tuck” has been used since the 14th century to mean one of several folds stitched into cloth to shorten, decorate, or tighten a garment.
The earliest OED citation is from The Testament of Love (1388), by Thomas Usk: “That no ianglyng may greue the lest tucke of thy hemmes” (“That no jangling [quarreling] may grieve [trouble] the least tuck of thy hems”).
(Usk, an English writer and bureaucrat caught up in the turbulent politics of the late 14th century, wrote the Testament in prison as an appeal for mercy. He was convicted of treason, hanged, and beheaded.)
We’ll end on a more palatable note—the use of “tuck” to mean “eat” or “eat heartily,” a sense that developed in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, perhaps from the “gather up” sense of the verb or the use of the noun “tuck” for a fishing net, a usage that appeared in the early 17th century.
The OED’s first citation for “tuck” used to mean “consume, swallow (food or drink)” is from Barham Downs (1784), a novel by the English writer Robert Bage: “We will dine together; tuck up a bottle or two of claret.”
The dictionary’s first example for “tuck” in the sense of “feed heartily or greedily; esp. with in, into,” uses the gerund (“tucking”): “Tom Sponge now began cramming unmercifully, exclaiming every three mouthfuls, ‘Rare tucking in, Sir William.’ ”
Finally, the Yorkshire schoolmaster Wackford Squeers uses the phrasal verb “tuck into” in this OED citation from the Dickens novel Nicholas Nickleby (1839): “If you’ll just let little Wackford tuck into something fat, I’ll be obliged to you.”
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