Scam
nounA dishonest scheme designed to cheat people out of money or personal information.
How to spell scam
4 letters · 1 syllable
How to pronounce scam
What does scam mean?
- nounA dishonest scheme designed to cheat people out of money or personal information.
- verbTo cheat or defraud someone, especially out of money.
Scam in a sentence
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noun
The email promising a free holiday turned out to be a scam.
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verb
Fraudsters often scam shoppers with fake online stores.
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noun
Police warned pensioners about a phone scam targeting their savings.
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verb
He tried to scam the elderly couple out of their pension.
Where does scam come from?
Language of origin: Unknown
Scam is a relatively recent word whose origin is genuinely murky. It surfaced in American carnival and underworld slang during the early 1960s, meaning a swindle or a confidence trick, and quickly spread into mainstream use. No clear parent word has ever been agreed upon: some lexicographers connect it to the older slang verb 'scamp', meaning to cheat or to do work carelessly, while others point to dialect terms like 'scamander' (to wander about deceitfully) or even the Spanish 'escamotear', to swipe or whisk away by sleight of hand. Because the trail goes cold so quickly, most dictionaries simply label its origin as unknown. The spelling is mercifully phonetic, so its only real trap is remembering that it ends in a single plain 'm'.
How the word is built
- scam (a single unanalysable root; no prefix or suffix)
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