Chock-Cheke-Chokken-Full

So I'm sitting here working on a piece of marketing material for my day job, and I implement the phrase "chock-full of valuable information!" ...Chock-full. What does that even mean?

Apparently I'm not the only one to wonder, because a bunch of answers are jumping for my attention when I type my question into Google (which has a wonderful tribute up today to the guy who created petri dishes, by the way). I now find myself staring at The Mavens' Word of the Day from Random House.

Though the page is dated January of 1998, I'm gonna go with it. I can't imagine that the origins of "chock-full" have changed much in the last 15 years if they haven't changed in the past several centuries.

The earliest versions of chock-full showed up in the fifteenth century as "chokkefulle" and "chekefull" and then disappeared! How a word disappears I have no idea, but apparently the early forms of chock-full did. When it reappeared two centuries later, it was in the form of "choke-full" and "chuck-full."

Choke-full? Chuck-full? What kind of word is this?? Chuck-fill makes me think of vomit and full makes me think of, well, full. So I have an image of a vom filled bucket sloshing around in my mind. /gag. And Choke-full? Well that's just weird.

There is speculation that the word as we know it today means "cheek-full" as in "cheeks stuffed full like a squirrel." The Old English word for cheek could apparently be where the original "chokke" or "cheke" came from. I can maybe buy into that.

Oh, this other theory is that the "chock" part of chock-full represents Middle English "chokken" which means "to cram" which is from an Old English word "to thrust" and apparently that all boils down to "chock-full" meaning "crammed full!" I like  this explanation!! Crammed full is a synonym of chock-full, so it not only makes the most sense but it seems the most rich in its history. Three wordly ancestors for "chock." Now that's cool.

There's some other bits on Mavens' Word of the Day about chock representing the ancestor of choke and the compound becoming "full to the point of choking," which, I mean, I have been there--I ate two plates of pork chops, broccoli, and potatoes last night and thought I was going to chuck-full for a good four hours--but I don't like this meaning as much as the second.

I think from now on I'll write "chock-full" as "chokken-full." You know, as a throw back to Middle English. And to confuse people.

I'll probably leave it modern for this marketing material, though... Something tells me my boss wouldn't find "chokken-full" to be as cool as I do.