Word of the Day

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Grift was born in the argot of the underworld, a realm in which a "grifter" might be a pickpocket, a crooked gambler, or a confidence man—any criminal who relied on skill and wits rather than physical violence—and to be "on the grift" was to make a living by stings and clever thefts. Grift may have evolved from graft, a slightly older word meaning "to acquire dishonestly," but its exact origins are uncertain. We do know that the verb grift first finagled its way into print in the early 20th century, as demonstrated in George Bronson-Howard's 1915 novel God's Man, where it appears in gerund form: "Grifting ain't what it used to be. Fourteenth Street's got protection down to a system—a regular underworld tariff on larceny."