chouse \CHOWSS ("OW" as in "cow")\ verb
: cheat, trick
Example sentence: In Dickens's _A Tale of Two Cities_, Mr. Cruncher says, "If I ain't, what with piety and one blowed thing and another, been choused this last week into as bad luck as ever a poor devil of a honest tradesman met with!"
Did you know? "You shall chouse him of Horses, Cloaths, and Mony," wrote John Dryden in his 1662 play _Wild Gallant_. Dryden was one of the first English writers to use "chouse," but he wasn't the last. That term, which may derive from a Turkish word meaning "doorkeeper" or "messenger," has a rich literary past, appearing in works by Samuel Pepys, Henry Fielding, Sir Walter Scott, and Charles Dickens, among others, but its use dropped off in the 20th century. In fact, English speakers of today may be more familiar with another "chouse," a verb used in the American West to mean "to drive or herd roughly." In spite of their identical spellings, though, the two "chouse" homographs are not related (and the origin of the latter is a source of some speculation).
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