trickery

trick +‎ -ery, first recorded in 1719. (This etymology is missing or incomplete. Please add to it, or discuss it at the Etymology scriptorium. Particularly: “Old French tricherie?”)

• Audio (US)

  (file)

• (US) IPA^(key): /tɹɪ.kə.ɹi/

trickery (countable and uncountable, plural trickeries)

1. (uncountable) Deception or underhanded behavior.
   • 1852, Charles Dickens, chapter 1, in Bleak House:

     In trickery, evasion, procrastination, spoliation, botheration, under false pretences of all sorts, there are influences that can never come to good.

2. (uncountable) The art of dressing up; imposture.
3. (uncountable) Artifice; the use of one or more stratagems.
   • 2012 April 21, Jonathan Jurejko, “Newcastle 3-0 Stoke”, in BBC Sport‎:

     French winger Hatem Ben Arfa has also taken plenty of plaudits recently and he was the architect of the opening goal with some superb trickery on the left touchline.

4. (countable) An instance of deception, underhanded behavior, dressing up, imposture, artifice, etc.
   • 1809, Washington Irving, chapter 47, in Knickerbocker's History of New York:

     [H]e did not wrap his rugged subject in silks and ermines, and other sickly trickeries of phrase.

   • 1898, Bret Harte, “See UP”, in Stories in Light and Shadow:

     The miners found diversions even in his alleged frauds and trickeries . . . and were fond of relating with great gusto his evasion of the Foreign Miners' Tax.

• See Thesaurus:deception

• politrickery

• treachery

• “trickery”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.