poky
/ˈpəʊki
/(also pokey)
adjective (pokier, pokiest)
1(Of a room or building) uncomfortably small and cramped: five of us shared the poky little room...
- This hit me hard, and I felt vulnerable in the poky hotel room with only the ticking time bomb of a box and the view of my sea for comfort.
- The place is small and pokey, with cramped rooms and straight, narrow pathways.
- The regulator and his staff operate from the third floor of a rather pokey building that resembles a cheap hotel.
Synonyms
small, little, tiny;
cramped, confined, restricted, narrow, tight, uncomfortable, cell-like, boxy
informal with no room to swing a cat
euphemistic ‘compact’, ‘bijou’, ‘easy to maintain/clean’, ‘well planned’
archaic strait
rare incommodious
2 informal (Especially of a car) having considerable power or acceleration.The cabin itself is a huge step forward on the previous model, which was pokey for a car of its overall dimensions.
3North American Annoyingly slow: his speech was poky, like he was a little simple...
- If you have an older PC, then a slower processor and pokey system components may cause a bottleneck, and you won't get the graphics performance for which you overpaid.
- With that much memory available there would be little reason for programs to constantly access that pokey old hard drive: Savvy apps could load just about everything into memory.
- So this Saturday, April 16, is your chance to ditch your slow, pokey and unused technology.
Derivatives
pokily
pokiness
- When one of the trucks pulled over, I realized what was causing its pokiness.
- If we subtract the possible effects of leaky fuel tanks and space dust en route, the best explanation for this pokiness becomes magnetic interaction - in this case, with the Sun's field.
Origin
Mid 19th century (in the sense 'concerned with petty matters'): from poke1 (in a contemporaneous sense 'confine') + -y1.