Meaning
To buy or accept something without inspecting it first, and so risk discovering too late that it is worthless or not what it was claimed to be. Usually a warning about blind purchases, sight-unseen deals or unexamined offers, and often framed as advice not to do it. Informal and cautionary, most at home in talk of purchases and deals gone wrong. Regional use: General English.
Origin
A poke was a small bag or sack, from Anglo-Norman and Old Northern French poke/pouque, a variant of the Old French word that also gave English pouch; pocket began as its diminutive, a little bag. The expression began as literal market advice: piglets were sold tied in sacks, and a buyer who did not open the bag could be cheated. The earliest English record is the Proverbs of Hendyng (c. 1275), 'Wan man gevit be a pig, opin be powch'. Around 1380 John Wycliffe already uses the continental variant 'to buy a cat in the sack', and most European languages carry an equivalent warning against buying a cat in a bag. The London grocer Richard Hill's commonplace book (early 1500s) advises 'When ye proffer the pigge open the poke', and John Heywood's 1555 epigrams give the modern shape: 'I wyll neuer bye the pyg in the poke'. A popular story connects the phrase with 'let the cat out of the bag', the cheating seller's substitution supposedly revealed; Word Histories rejects this, noting the cat phrase appears only in the late 18th century, some five centuries later, and that a live cat could hardly pass for a piglet.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a pig in a poke
- don't buy a pig in a poke
- pig in a poke
- sell someone a pig in a poke
Usage Examples
- Buying the cottage unseen at auction felt brave until the survey revealed the subsidence; we had paid for a pig in a poke.
- The online listing showed no photograph of the engine, so my brother refused to bid, telling the seller he was not about to buy a pig in a poke.
- Investors who wired deposits to the unlicensed developer discovered they had bought a pig in a poke when the registered office turned out to be a post box.