Cucking-stool (The)

or Choking-stool, for ducking scolds, is not connected with choke (to stifle), but the French choquer; hence the archiac verb cuck (to throw), and one still in use, chuck (chuck-farthing). The cucking-stool is the stool which is chucked or thrown into the water.

“Now, if one cucking-stool was for each scold,

Some towns, I fear, would not their numbers hold.”

Poor Robin (1746).

· ·

Entry taken from Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, edited by the Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D. and revised in 1895.