A quockerwodger is a wooden puppet on a string — the kind of jumping-jack toy whose arms and legs fly out when you pull the cord. In Victorian slang it was also a kind of politician.

The word reaches the record in 1860, in the second edition of John Camden Hotten's Dictionary of Modern Slang. Hotten gave both senses in one entry: a wooden toy figure, which, when pulled by a string, jerks its limbs about. The term is used in a slang sense to signify a pseudo-politician, one whose strings of action are pulled by somebody else. It is not in his first edition of 1859, so it arrived — in print, at least — between the two.

The image is exact. A quockerwodger does not move of its own accord. Somebody out of sight pulls, and the limbs fly up. The political quockerwodger was the member who voted, spoke and gestured as his patron required, and whose apparent energy was all borrowed.

It caught on. Green's Dictionary of Slang finds a Kentish newspaper in 1864 saying that such a politician is now often termed a quockerwodger, and an 1863 book, The Story of a Lancashire Thief, in which a man who chanted his own songs at races and fairs works a quockerwodger made to look like Louis Napoleon, and makes everybody laugh like mad. Hotten also discussed the word in his introduction, among the political slang of the day.

Where it came from, nobody knows. It has no obvious parts and no recorded inventor, and Wiktionary lists the origin as unknown — possibly a nonce word, made up for the occasion.

The thing it describes has never gone away. Green's records a newspaper reviving the word in 2018, and every era finds new candidates for it.