grifter
Plural: grifters
Noun
- A person who engages in petty swindling or confidence tricks.
- a person who swindles you by means of deception or fraud
- A con artist; someone who pulls confidence games; a swindler, scammer, huckster, hustler, and/or charlatan.
- A manipulator or otherwise generally corrupt person who "games" a system, group of people, or other entity for selfish gains; especially of a political "sell-out" perceived as lacking integrity.
Examples
- He accused his opponent of being a grifter after a questionable word challenge.
Origin / Etymology
From grift + -er; or probably an alteration of grafter (“a corrupt person, one who accepts bribes”), which is essentially a doublet of the same word. Originally circus slang (carny; compare shill of similar semantics), gradually widened in sense. First attested in 1906; popularized online circa late 2010s.
Synonyms
chiseler, chiseller, defrauder, gouger, scammer, swindler, bristler, bunco artist, bunco-steerer, con artist, confidence artist, confidence trickster, conman, flimflammer, grifter, lugger, magsman, mountebank, saltimbanco, shark-gull, sharker, sharpster, slicker, smooth operator, spiv
Scrabble Score: 11
grifter: valid Scrabble (US) TWL Wordgrifter: valid Scrabble Word in Merriam-Webster MW Dictionary
grifter: valid Scrabble Word in International Collins CSW Dictionary