Scottish slang of the day — BOAK
27 April 2007

I like how ‘boak’ is used like a Chinese word, it’s a verb and a noun all at once.

The most popular use appears to be, “_____ gave me The Boak.”

Here, clearly, it means _____ has given our speaker a feeling of nausea.

You can also say that someone (or yourself) Boaked. I have Boaked many times in my life, most notably in front of the church I used to attend (in the drain, lah, I’m not so disrespectful of other people’s property, even when I’m hammered).

Here is an image of The Boak:

Turtle spew

Solomon the tiny turtle drank a lot of Edradour whisky, and it gave him The Boak. He Boaked, and got Boak all over the table.

I’ve never heard of someone Boaking, though.

5 Comments

  1. It's appears like a description of the sound sometimes made during the aforementioned action… like to 'ralph', or to 'barf', to booaaakkkk… ergh!

    Comment by TuTu — 28 April 2007 @ 7:46 am

  2. Hehe. Too true.

    Comment by Andrea — 30 April 2007 @ 9:05 am

  3. I think you’ll be interested to see boak is not slang at all (nor onomatopoeia):
    http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/boak
    My family is from Lanarkshire and I heard it a lot in my youth, e.g. “he gives me the dry boaks”.
    So…descriptive!

    Comment by David — 17 January 2008 @ 1:23 pm

  4. Is it more a Lanarkshire thing than anywhere else in Scotland, David?

    Comment by Andrea — 17 January 2008 @ 3:49 pm

  5. I’m thinking you’d say “He’s awa hæn a boak” rather than “He’s awa boakin”

    “Hæn a boak” sounds better to my ears.

    Comment by Hanii Puppy — 6 January 2010 @ 6:39 pm

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