Adjacent Words

Flimflam definitions

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Webster's 1828 Dictionary

FLIM'FLAM, n. A freak; a trick.

WordNet (r) 3.0 (2005)

n
1: a swindle in which you cheat at gambling or persuade a person to buy worthless property [syn: bunco, bunco game, bunko, bunko game, con, confidence trick, confidence game, con game, gyp, hustle, sting, flimflam]

Merriam Webster's

I. noun Etymology: perhaps of Scandinavian origin; akin to Old Norse flim mockery Date: circa 1570 1. deceptive nonsense 2. deception, fraud II. transitive verb (flimflammed; flimflamming) Date: 1660 to subject to a flimflam • flimflammer noun • flimflammery noun

Oxford Reference Dictionary

n. & v. --n. 1 a trifle; nonsense; idle talk. 2 humbug; deception. --v.tr. (flimflammed, flimflamming) cheat; deceive. Derivatives: flimflammer n. flimflammery n. (pl. -ies). Etymology: imit. redupl.

Webster's 1913 Dictionary

Flimflam Flim"flam, n. [Cf. Flam.] A freak; a trick; a lie. --Beau. & Fl.

Moby Thesaurus

balderdash, ballot-box stuffing, balls, baloney, bamboozle, bamboozlement, beat, befool, befooling, beguile of, bilk, blague, bluffing, bosh, boutade, brainstorm, bull, bullshit, bunco, bunk, bunkum, burn, calculated deception, capriccio, caprice, cardsharping, cheat, cheating, chicane, chisel, chouse, chouse out of, circumvention, claptrap, cock-and-bull story, cog, cog the dice, con, conceit, conning, cozen, cozenage, crank, crap, craze, crazy idea, crib, crotchet, deceit, deceiving, deception, deceptiveness, defraud, defrauding, delusion, delusiveness, diddle, diddling, dishonesty, do, do in, do out of, dodge, double-talk, drivel, dupery, enmeshment, ensnarement, entanglement, entrapment, euchre, exaggeration, eyewash, fad, fairy tale, fake, fallaciousness, fallacy, falsehood, falseness, falsity, fancy, fantastic notion, fantasy, farfetched story, farrago, fib, fiction, finagle, fish story, fishy transaction, flam, fleece, flimflammery, fob, fond illusion, fool, fool notion, fooling, fraud, fraudulence, fraudulency, freak, freakish inspiration, fudge, gammon, gerrymandering, ghost story, gouge, graft, grift, gull, gyp, gyp joint, half-truth, hallucination, harebrained idea, have, hoax, hocus, hocus-pocus, hogwash, hoke, hokum, hoodwink, hoodwinking, hooey, hot air, humbug, humbuggery, humor, illicit business, illusion, imposition, imposture, jazz, jiggery-pokery, kidding, kink, legal fiction, lie, little white lie, maggot, megrim, mendacity, mirage, moonshine, mulct, notion, outwitting, overreach, overreaching, pack the deal, passing fancy, phantasm, pigeon, pious fiction, practice fraud upon, prevarication, putting on, quirk, racket, rook, scam, screw, self-deception, sell, sell gold bricks, sham, shave, shortchange, slight stretching, snow job, song and dance, spoofery, spoofing, stack the cards, stick, sting, story, subterfuge, swindle, swindling, take a dive, tale, tall story, tall tale, taradiddle, thimblerig, throw a fight, toy, trickiness, tricking, trumped-up story, untruth, vagary, victimization, victimize, vision, whim, whim-wham, whimsy, white lie, willful misconception, wishful thinking, yarn