Howked

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. Dug or scraped something out of the earth, as in the Scots dialect verb meaning to excavate by hand
2. Excavated or pulled something up from the ground through digging, a term common in Scottish and northern English speech
3. Scooped or burrowed material out of soil, especially in the regional sense of digging up or extracting it

Etymology: "Howked" is the past tense and past participle of "howk," a Scots and northern English verb meaning to dig or scrape out, often used of digging up roots, peat, or the earth itself. The verb survives in Scots and dialects of northern England, where it has long described hard physical labour in the soil, such as grubbing for potatoes or clearing a drain. Because "howk" is a dialect word rather than a standard English one, its past tense "howked" tends to appear mainly in regional writing, folk speech, and older literature from the Scottish Borders and the north. Readers who meet it in a novel or poem are usually seeing a deliberate touch of local colour.