When you’re reading a series of texts chock-full of obscure words and other barely interesting trivia (don’t look at me; I don’t know where you’d find anything like that), you might reasonably ask yourself: “chock-full? What’s a chock, and how can it be full?”
The phrase “chock-full” has been around for a very long time. Its first recorded appearance was in the mid-1400s in the classic “Morte Arthure”: “Charottez chokkefull charegyde with golde.” It’s been in pretty regular use ever since, with a few spelling variations here and there. Tobias Smollett spelled it “chocque-full”, Thomas Hughes went with “chock full” without the hyphen, and Nathanial Hawthorne economized even more in 1863 by making it a single word: “chockfull”.
As for what a “chock” might be and why it might be full, the phrase was originally based on a slightly different sense — it comes from “choke,” and means “so full that you choke.” “Choke” is a bit mysterious, but it probably comes from Old English, where it was something closer to “achoke.” That word seems to predate even Old English, and is so old that the most recent citation anyone has found is from Chaucer. It’s also possible, though, that the chock in “chock-full” is instead from “cheek.” Not really that different, I suppose, since if your mouth is so full you might choke, your cheeks are probably the best indicator.
If “chock” came from “choke,” that means it probably came originally from Scotland, while if it comes from “cheek,” it probably first arose farther south, in England. It’s hard to tell about things like that, the British Isles in those days were chock-full of dialects, languages, and variations.
