Transcript for the Piece Audio version of poker - word of the day

This is the etymology moment, and I'm Charles Hodgson. Today we'll hear the story behind the word poker.
This is Charles Hodgson with podictionary, the podcast for word lovers.
The podictionary word for today is poker: In 1911 Ambrose Bierce said in his Devil's Dictionary Poker: A game said to be played with cards for some purpose to this lexicographer unknown. I'm sure he was joshing, but I guess it expresses his distain for such game playing. Although a number of sources give a number of etymologies for the name of the game poker?including the non-answer "origin unknown"?I'm pleased to see that the Oxford English Dictionary has an entry that has been updated to 2005 for the word poker, so I think we can trust this one. The OED says that poker probably developed from a French name of a card game poque that in turn was named after the French verb poquer that meant to place a bet. That French poquer would have been spelled P O Q U E R so this may have resulted in the English pronunciation of poker. The French word in turn may have had a German ancestor but before I go there I'll also tell you that the definition for poker that the OED gives starts out QUOTE "a card game related to brag.." Now if I follow the thread back to the entry for brag, I see there among the definitions you might expect to see, like someone who boasts, definition number six that reads:
A game at cards, essentially identical with the modern game of ?poker?. The name is taken from the ?brag? or challenge given by one of the players to the rest to turn up cards equal in value to his.
This is dated 1734 for a first citation, while the French poquer comes almost 20 years later. The likely German forebear of the French word had a meaning of boast or brag?what a coincidence?and the bragging must have come with some physical bravado as well because the literal translation of the German word means "to knock" or "to rap" as you'd do to the table in challenging your opponents. I look to a number of histories of poker and they all appear to point to the French ownership of Louisiana as the reason poker took root in New Orleans and from there spread up the Mississippi. The first citation for poker is in 1836 but apparently the game was first described as being played in New Orleans two years before that but was instead called "the cheating game"; clearly a reference to the bluffing that is involved and that would have tended to be associated with bragging as well.