Scam
noun, verb, slang ·Common ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 A fraudulent deal.
"That marketing scheme looks like a scam to me."
- 2 a fraudulent business scheme wordnet
- 3 Something that is promoted using scams.
"That new diet burger is a scam."
- 1 To defraud or embezzle. ambitransitive
"They tried to scam her out of her savings."
- 2 deprive of by deceit wordnet
- 3 To seek out a partner for casual sex; to hit on. slang
"His friend nudged me. "It's true. JJ only scams black ladies." / "You don't say?" / "J-boy scammed a real live Miss Black Universe once. Met her in a disco down in Honduras. Wearing her title. Since then he's been obsessed.""
Example
More examples"In retrospect, I should have known that it was a scam."
Etymology
US American carnival slang of uncertain origin. Possibly from scamp (“swindler, cheater”) or Irish cam (“crooked”). Also possibly from Danish skam; if so, it would be a doublet of shame and sham. First use appears c. 1963 in the periodical Time. The word became common use among the US drug culture when in early 1980, after Operation ABSCAM, an FBI sting operation directed at public officials, became public.
Related phrases
More for "scam"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.