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In days of yore, if you wanted to call someone a sap or a dupe, the word cokes was it, what you wanted, the real thing: to make a cokes of someone was to make a fool of them. This now-obsolete noun is believed to be the source of the verb coax. However, the earliest known sense of the verb, appearing in the late 16th century, was not “to make a fool of” (this meaning came later) but rather something sweeter: “to pet or caress; to treat lovingly.” As such an act of coaxing (or “cokesing”) was sometimes done for personal gain or favor, the word soon came to be used to refer to influencing or persuading people by kind acts or words. By the 19th century, the spelling cokes had fallen out of use, along with the meanings “to make a fool of” and “to treat lovingly.”
Examples of coax in a Sentence
Julia Gomez, USA Today, 30 Oct. 2025
Following the arrest, police managed to convince her partner, Moore, to help coax a confession from Wuornos.
—Allison Degrushe, Entertainment Weekly, 30 Oct. 2025
Kenna Hughes-Castleberry, Space.com, 4 Sep. 2025
All of which curious George, a dab hand at psychological manipulation, coaxes along with the gentlest of nudges.
—Justin Chang, The New Yorker, 12 Mar. 2025
See All Example Sentences for coax
Cite this Entry
“Coax.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/coax. Accessed 4 Nov. 2025.
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