Other forms: jokes, joked, joking
A joke is a short funny story told to make people laugh. Tell a joke, an old joke, get the joke.
Its structure is setup and punchline, and the whole craft is in how the punchline reverses what the setup led you to expect. An in-joke is one only a group understands. As a verb, to joke is to say something not meant seriously: I was joking. Note the joke is on somebody; a running joke; and no joke, meaning genuinely serious — the drive is no joke.
1nounjokeA short funny story told to make people laugh.
“He told a funny joke, and everyone laughed.”
2verbmeantTo say something not meant seriously.
“Don't worry, I was only joking; I'm not really leaving.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
joke is something said to amuse.
Latin iocus meant a jest or pastime, from a root meaning a spoken word. The word arrived in English in the seventeenth century as slang and was considered vulgar for about a century.
Proto-Indo-European
*yek-
Proto-Indo-European
*yokos — word, utterance
Proto-Italic
*jokos — word, (playful?) saying
Latin
iocus — joke, jest, pastime
English, today
joke
From Latin iocus (“joke, jest, pastime”), from Proto-Italic jokos (“word, (playful?) saying”), from Proto-Indo-European yokos (“word, utterance”), from ultimate root Proto-Indo-European yek- (“to speak, utter”) (of which distant cognates include Proto-Celtic yextis (“language”) (Breton yezh (“language”) and Welsh iaith (“language”)) and German Beichte (“confession”)). Cognate with French jeu, Italian gioco, Portuguese jogo, Spanish juego, Romanian joc, English Yule, Danish Jule, Norwegian Bokmål Jul, Swedish Jul, and Norwegian Nynorsk jol.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA