(For reasons I have never fully understood, people on almost all SE sites are very adverse to proposing negative answers, such as the one I’m going to propose here…. Does the answer I’m looking for include the definition of “no”?

I

respect the intention of other answerers, to try to provide something approaching what you are after, but in the end, I think that misses the intent of the question. When a questioner uses any one of the suggested words for their own purpose, the questioner will still find a more complete answer to his/her question. To use one word and achieve the meaning: use only one word and you will be confused. What does “spooking” mean? “Hack jokes with a message no matter how silly or funny they seem to be” are fine to use as a means of surprise, embarrassment or cause laughter for a person.

I like to speak English. If I think that is the best thing you can do with that, I disagree. There are lexical gaps, which mean some things require a little explanation?

I scared my friend. It really did be for fun!

Just for the heck of it I spooked my friend.

I pulled a prank on my friend that wasn’t legal. So I got it in return.

This isn’t a limitation of English, or any language, it’s the strength of it. Is it so much better for semantics to find a single word for each nuance on every fine and fine thing? Modification through explanation is what let us convey anything and everything without having to be simply walking definition databases by no means.

I’m really dumb by the hesitancy to not speak when there’s no word for something. And I mean it in a good way like here.

Is there any word for a word? “I

need to learn why my kids are telling me this,” says a professor in his spare time. “