CHOCK A BLOCK ORIGIN

Hello! The origins of 'chock-a-block' are very interesting. It sounds and means exactly like a Turkish phrase that means 'very full' or 'very crowded'. We can trace the usage in English back to the time when pirate ships with mixed Turkish-English crews roamed the Mediterranean, and when agreements between Elizabeth I and Sultan Murad IV required Turkish sailors to give assistance to English ships in distress. This is the true root of the word. When retired captains like Henry Mainwaring wrote the first dictionaries on sea terminology in the 1600s, they misunderstood where the term was from (and didn't care, anyway, about what the common sailors knew), and decided it must be to do with ropes and tackles. But really it is a pirate loan word from Turkish. I have written about this with examples here:

https://babelediting.com/2025/08/08/etymology-of-chock-a-block/