hornswoggle
Other forms: hornswoggled; hornswoggling; hornswoggles
Looking for a colorful Americanism to describe how you've just been deceived out of all your money? Say you've been hornswoggled!
American English has a rich array of verbs to refer to swindling someone, like bamboozle, hoodwink, and humbug. Hornswoggle is one that's particularly fun to say. According to one story, the word comes from the way that a lassoed cow would move its head back and forth to try to break free. But most dictionaries simply say its origin is unknown, so let's just thank the anonymous 19th-century American wit who came up with this ridiculous word.
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(offensive) deprive of by deceitsynonyms: bunco, con, defraud, diddle, gip, goldbrick, mulct, nobble, rook, scam, short-change, shortchange, swindle, victimizetypes:short, short-change, shortchangecheat out of by giving back less money than is due to someone who has overpaid
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Vocabulary lists containing hornswoggle
You'd be a fool not to learn these words related to pranks, jokes, and deceit. For more on the history of these words, read The Cunning, Risible Holiday of April Fool's Day.
Ben Zimmer is the executive producer of Vocabulary.com and the Visual Thesaurus. He is language columnist for The Boston Globe and the former "On Language" columnist for The New York Times Magazine. He has worked as editor for American dictionaries at Oxford University Press and as a consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary. He is also the chair of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society. We asked Ben, as an expert on the history of American English, to give us some of his favorite words that originated in the United States. "I'm fascinated by how the English language developed a unique American flavor (not flavour!) beginning in colonial times. I've been collecting examples of great contributions from American English. Here is a cornucopia of copacetic coinages from fertile American minds."
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