Cons

How to spell cons

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce cons

What does cons mean?

1. nounThe arguments or points against a decision or course of action.
2. verbDeceives or swindles someone in order to gain money or trust.

Cons in a sentence

• noun

  The report listed the pros and cons of moving the office downtown.

• verb

  He cons vulnerable pensioners into handing over their savings.

• noun

  Before signing the lease, she weighed the cons against the obvious benefits.

• verb

  The salesman cons unwary tourists with a fake watch every summer.

Where does cons come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word is the plural of 'con' in the sense of an argument or point against something, and it traces back to the Latin contra, meaning 'against'. The full original phrase was the Latin pro et contra, literally 'for and against', which English writers shortened in the 1500s to the now familiar 'pros and cons'. Here 'con' is simply the clipped survivor of contra, kept alive almost entirely inside that fixed pairing. The same contra root sits inside everyday words such as 'contrary' and 'contradict', where the sense of opposition is still plain. A separate and unrelated 'con', meaning to swindle (short for 'confidence trick') and dating from nineteenth-century American slang, can also take the plural 's', which is why the spelling looks identical across very different meanings.

How the word is built

• con (from Latin contra: against)
• -s (plural)