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swindle

UK/ˈswɪndəl/US/ˈswɪndəl/
nounB2+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #9,559 of 15,258leans spoken

Other forms: swindles

A swindle is a scheme to cheat somebody out of money. A great swindle, pull off a swindle, swindled out of his savings.

It works by persuasion rather than force, which is why victims so often blame themselves and so many swindles go unreported. The word came from German and arrived through the London financial world, where it was first used of dishonest company promoters.

Definitions of swindle

  1. 1nounswindleA scheme to cheat somebody out of money.B2+

    “The whole investment scheme turned out to be a swindle, and they lost their savings.”

swindle is a fraud.

Where it comes from

A back-formation from swindler, from German Schwindler, a giddy person or a cheat.

  1. German

    Schwindler

  2. English, today

    swindle

a back-formation from swindler, from German Schwindler, from German schwindeln, from Middle High German swindeln, swindelen, from Old High German swintilōn, frequentative of the verb swintan, from Proto-West Germanic swindan (“to diminish”). See also Modern German schwindeln, Danish svindel and svindle, Dutch zwindelen and zwendelen, Yiddish שווינדל, Low German swinneln, Middle English swinden (“to languish, waste away”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

swindle in the wild

  • The drop swindle was a confidence trick commonly used during the 19th and 20th centuries.

    Drop swindle

  • While the drop swindle is now fairly well known it is still practiced today as most major cities receive complaints regarding this specific scam.

    Drop swindle

  • Horowitz and Reinfeld observe that swindles, "though ignored in virtually all chess books", "play an enormously important role in over-the-board chess, and decide the fate of countless games".

    Swindle (chess)

  • The best swindles can be quite artistic, however, and some are widely known.

    Swindle (chess)

  • In geometric topology, it was introduced by Mazur and is often called the Mazur swindle.

    Eilenberg–Mazur swindle

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the Schwindler family

swindleswindler

swindle — used about once every 4,708 pages · #9,559 · point at the bar for the others