Word of the Day

: November 6, 2014

chouse

verb CHOWSS

What It Means

: cheat, trick

chouse in Context

In Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, the miserable Mr. Cruncher fumes, "If I ain't … been choused this last week into as bad luck as ever a poor devil of a honest tradesman met with!"

"The 18th fairway Saturday afternoon bore a scene only accessible in a gentrified sport such as golf; Polson's Jaylin Kenney bookended by Erin Tabish and Katie Fyall of Whitefish, all three girls calm and cordial as could be, each likely secretly hoping to chouse a collapse out of the other." - Mark Robertson, Lake County Leader & Advertiser (Polson, Montana), October 9, 2013

Did You Know?

"You shall chouse him of Horses, Cloaths, and Mony," wrote John Dryden in his 1663 play Wild Gallant. Dryden was one of the first English writers to use chouse, but he wasn't the last. That term, which may derive from a Turkish word meaning "doorkeeper" or "messenger," has a rich literary past, appearing in works by Samuel Pepys, Henry Fielding, Sir Walter Scott, and Charles Dickens, among others, but its use dropped off in the 20th century. In fact, English speakers of today may be more familiar with another chouse, a verb used in the American West to mean "to drive or herd roughly." In spite of their identical spellings, though, the two chouse homographs are not related (and the origin of the latter is a source of some speculation).