practical joke

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practical joke

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practical joke (plural practical jokes)

1. A playful trick done for amusement to the detriment of someone else.

   The class put a whoopee cushion on the teacher's chair as a practical joke.

   • 2012, Andrew Martin, Underground Overground: A passenger's history of the Tube, Profile Books, →ISBN, page 58:

     This is a street of elegant stucco terraced houses, two of which (numbers 23 and 24) straddled the mouth of the canyon. [...] they were knocked down and replaced with fake houses [...]. So began 150 years of practical jokes, with coal merchants sending young apprentices to deliver coal to the façades, or letters addressed to Mr N. O. Body, 24 Leinster Gardens. (There is no letterbox).

• See also Thesaurus:prank

• practical joker