Swike

//swaɪk// adj, noun, verb

adj, noun, verb ·Moderate ·High school level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    Deceit; treachery. Scotland, dialectal
  2. 2
    A deceiver; betrayer, traitor. dialectal, obsolete

    "The Saxon Chronicle contradicts itself as to Algar's outlawry, stating in one passage that he was outlawed without any kind of guilt, and in another that he was outlawed as swike, or traitor, and that he made a confession of it before all the men there gathered."

  3. 3
    A hiding place; den; cave. dialectal, obsolete
Verb
  1. 1
    To deceive, cheat; betray. dialectal, obsolete, transitive
  2. 2
    To stop, cease. dialectal, obsolete, transitive
Adjective
  1. 1
    Deceitful; treacherous. dialectal, obsolete

Synonyms

All synonyms
anchorassfuckastandbackstabberbeguilingbetray

Example

More examples

"The Saxon Chronicle contradicts itself as to Algar's outlawry, stating in one passage that he was outlawed without any kind of guilt, and in another that he was outlawed as swike, or traitor, and that he made a confession of it before all the men there gathered."

Etymology

From Middle English swiken, from Old English swīcan (“to wander, depart, cease from, yield, give way, fail, fall short, be wanting, abandon, desert, turn traitor, deceive, rebel”), from Proto-West Germanic *swīkwan, from Proto-Germanic *swīkwaną (“to dodge, swerve, avoid, betray”), from Proto-Indo-European *sweyg- (“to turn, move around, wander, swing”).

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