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Chicanery Has Roots in French
We have hardly any words that do so fully expresse the French clinquant, naiveté … chicaneries. So lamented English writer John Evelyn in a letter to Sir Peter Wyche in 1665. Evelyn and Wyche were members of a group called the Royal Society, which had formed a committee emulating the French Academy for the purpose of "improving the English language." We can surmise that, in Evelyn's estimation, the addition of chicanery to English from French was an improvement. What he apparently didn't realize was that English speakers had adopted the word from the French chicanerie before he wished for it; the term appears in English manuscripts dating from 1609. Similarly, clinquant ("glittering with gold or tinsel") dates from 1591. Naïveté, on the other hand, waited until 1673 to appear.
Synonyms
Examples of chicanery in a Sentence
Melik Kaylan, Forbes, 30 Oct. 2024
Specifically, expect to see a new look at the latest DLC for Alan Wake 2, The Lake House, and an in-depth look at the latest chicanery coming out of Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii.
—Ash Parrish, The Verge, 17 Oct. 2024
OpenAI did not inflict its current legal headache on itself out of cunning chicanery, but out of a desire to satisfy a number of different early stakeholders, many of them true believers.
—Kelsey Piper, Vox, 7 Dec. 2018
Election integrity crusaders have often sought to cast their efforts as innocent reactions to chicanery in the Democratic Party.
—Paolo Confino, Fortune, 24 Oct. 2024
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Dictionary Entries Near chicanery
Cite this Entry
“Chicanery.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/chicanery. Accessed 1 Dec. 2024.
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