hockshop
An informal American term for a pawnshop — the kind of place where you trade your guitar, old jewelry, or gaming console for quick cash, hoping to buy it back later (you usually don't).
Definitions
An informal American term for a pawnshop — the kind of place where you trade your guitar, old jewelry, or gaming console for quick cash, hoping to buy it back later (you usually don't). While "pawnshop" is the dominant term today, "hockshop" has a grittier, older-school ring to it that fits blues lyrics and hardboiled fiction perfectly. To "hock" something is to pawn it, and the shop where that transaction goes down is the hockshop.
He took his grandfather's watch down to the hockshop on Fifth and walked out with enough for two weeks' rent.
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(US, rare) A pawnshop.
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Semantically related
- hookshop73%
(slang, dated) A brothel.
- hookshop72%
Hookshop is dated British slang for a brothel, framing the establishment as a place where 'hooks' (prostitutes, in older slang) ply their trade. The term belongs to 19th and early 20th century vice vocabulary, encountered in social reform literature, police records, and period slang dictionaries. Entirely obsolete in contemporary usage. Like many Victorian brothel euphemisms, it uses an indirect commercial metaphor — a shop where a particular commodity is available — to describe the trade.
- hocker70%
One who hocks or pawns an item.
- hocker68%
A word with two very different lives: in its respectable sense, a hocker is simply someone who pawns or hocks items at a pawnshop. In its grosser slang incarnation, a hocker is a thick wad of phlegm that someone hacks up and spits out — the kind of productive cough result that makes bystanders wince. The phlegm meaning likely derives from the Yiddish/German 'hucken' (to cough up), while the pawn meaning comes from Dutch 'hok' (debt). Both are in wide use.