Shenanigans

//ʃɪˈnæn.ɪ.ɡənz// noun, verb

noun, verb ·Uncommon ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    Mischievous play, especially by children. plural, plural-normally

    "Shanti and Tom are playing noisily upstairs again. They’re up to their usual shenanigans."

  2. 2
    Deceitful tricks; trickery; games. plural, plural-normally

    "You should learn to spot their shenanigans and avoid being fooled."

  3. 3
    Strange, unusual, weird, or wacky occurrences. plural, plural-normally

    ""I'm sorry, but I'm not going to devote any of tonight's news to evil monkey shenanigans unless you can find something more down to earth to focus your report on.""

  4. 4
    plural of shenanigan. form-of, plural, plural-normally
Verb
  1. 1
    third-person singular simple present indicative of shenanigan form-of, indicative, present, singular, third-person

Synonyms

All synonyms
anticbanterbuffoonerycaperdirty trickdirty tricks

Example

More examples

"The shenanigans on Wall Street have sent the economy into a tailspin."

Etymology

From shenanigan + -s.

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