Tricknology
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 Tactics employed by white people to subjugate black people. countable, derogatory, uncountable
"In the genetic universe of Yakub's tricknology, such duping assumes the form of offspring whose ultimate purpose is to wreak havoc on their forebears."
- 2 Synonym of trickery. broadly, countable, uncountable
"That's all gone, as is the unit rule, the favorite son, hokey floor demonstrations, and much of the rest of the tricknology and sham that have helped make political conventions, dull, disreputable, infuriating, and undemocratic."
Synonyms
All synonymsExample
More examples"In the genetic universe of Yakub's tricknology, such duping assumes the form of offspring whose ultimate purpose is to wreak havoc on their forebears."
Etymology
Blend of trick + technology, apparently coined by Nation of Islam founder Wallace Fard Muhammad. The term first appears in the spelling tricknollogy in the 1938 American Journal of Sociology article "The Voodoo Cult Among Negro Migrants in Detroit" by Erdmann Doane Beynon, who quotes the term from the "Secret Ritual of the Nation of Islam", which were lessons given by Muhammad at his "University of Islam" and preserved through oral tradition. Beynon describes it as '"[a] cult term pronounced "trickenollogy"' and paraphrased from the lesson that the '"[t]he illiteracy of the southern Negroes now seemed due to Caucasian "tricknollogy".'
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.