Cheat

How to spell cheat

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce cheat

What does cheat mean?

1. verbTo act dishonestly or unfairly in order to gain an advantage.
2. nounA person who behaves dishonestly, or an act or means of deceiving.

Cheat in a sentence

• verb

  The invigilator warned that anyone caught trying to cheat would fail the exam.

• noun

  The other competitors branded him a cheat after the timing was rigged.

• verb

  Some players cheat at cards by hiding an extra ace up a sleeve.

• noun

  Entering the code felt like a cheat that let players skip the hard level.

Where does cheat come from?

Language of origin: French

Cheat is a shortened form of the older English word escheat, which arrived through Old French eschete from the Latin verb excadere, literally 'to fall out' or 'to fall away', built from ex 'out' and cadere 'to fall'. In medieval law an escheat was a piece of property that 'fell back' to the lord or the crown when a tenant died without heirs, and the royal officers who managed these reverted lands were known as escheators or, informally, cheaters. Because these officials gained a reputation for sharp and dishonest dealing as they seized estates, the clipped word cheat drifted from this legal sense into the general meaning of defrauding or deceiving someone by the middle of the sixteenth century. The same cadere root that sits behind cheat also surfaces in everyday words such as accident, cascade and decay, all of which carry the idea of something falling. Knowing that the modern spelling is simply escheat with its first syllable knocked off helps fix the plain ch-eat shape in mind.

How the word is built

• cheat (shortened from escheat: property falling to the lord)