Word of the Day

: March 14, 2020

hoise

verb HOYZ

What It Means

: lift, raise; especially : to raise into position by or as if by means of tackle

hoise in Context

"The closest Brennan has come to hoising the AHL's holy grail has been the conference finals on a couple of occasions, most recently with the Toronto Marlies." — Dave Isaac, The Courier-Post (Cherry Hill, New Jersey), 5 May 2018

"The 6-foot-3, 228-pound Ole Miss receiver ran a 4.33 40-yard dash, posted a 40.5 inch vertical and hoised 225 pounds on the bench 27 times." — James Koh, The Daily News (New York), 6 Mar. 2019

Did You Know?

The connection between hoise and hoist is a bit confusing. The two words are essentially synonymous variants, but hoist is far more common; hoise and its inflected forms hoised and hoising are infrequently used. But a variant of its past participle shows up fairly frequently as part of a set expression. And now, here's the confusing part: that variant past participle is hoist! The expression is "hoist with (or by) one's own petard," which means "victimized or hurt by one's own scheme." This oft-heard phrase owes its popularity to William Shakespeare's Hamlet in which the titular character says, "For 'tis the sport to have the engineer hoist with his own petar[d]." (A petard is a medieval explosive. The quote implies that the engineer—the person who sets the explosive device—is blown into the air by the explosion of his own device.)