Chump

//t͡ʃʌmp// noun, verb, slang

noun, verb, slang ·Common ·High school level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    An incompetent person, a blockhead; a loser. colloquial, derogatory

    "That chump wouldn't know his ass from a hole in the ground."

  2. 2
    a person who is gullible and easy to take advantage of wordnet
  3. 3
    A gullible person; a sucker; someone easily taken advantage of; someone lacking common sense. colloquial, derogatory

    "It shouldn't be hard to put one over on that chump."

  4. 4
    The thick end, especially of a piece of wood or of a joint of meat.

    "Shaped as if they had been unskilfully cut off the chump-end of something."

  5. 5
    A person's head or face. UK, obsolete, slang
Verb
  1. 1
    To treat (someone) as a chump; to defraud or swindle (someone). slang, transitive
  2. 2
    Dated form of chomp. alt-of, dated

    "At a neighbouring table two Germans were making a hearty meal, chumping the meat and smacking their lips in a kind of heavy ecstasy."

Synonyms

All synonyms
gullgullpatsysuckerdummyairhead

Example

More examples

"Tom may think he's a champ, but in actuality he's but a chump."

Etymology

Etymology 1

Origin uncertain; probably a blend of chunk and lump or stump, or perhaps a nasalised variant of chub (“someone chubby, something thick”). Compare Icelandic kubbur (“block of wood, chip (computing)”), Old Norse kumbr for kubbr (“block of wood”), English chop.

Etymology 2

Variant of chomp, itself a variant of champ (“to bite”). More at champ.

Related phrases

average frustrated chumpchump blockchump blockerchump changechump chopchump-blockchump-changeoff one's chumpone pump chump

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.