Fagin

[ fey-gin ]

noun
  1. (in Dickens' Oliver Twist) a villainous old man who trains and uses young boys as thieves.

  2. Also fagin. a person who teaches crime to others.

Words Nearby Fagin

Dictionary.com Unabridged Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2024

How to use Fagin in a sentence

  • He looks like Fagin from Oliver Twist—wiry, with long, graying hair and a perfectly pointy beard.

    Lily Allen As You've Never Seen Her | Lucie Greene | September 10, 2009 | THE DAILY BEAST
  • It must come some time or another; and why not in the winter time when you dont want to go out a-walking so much; eh, Fagin?

  • Fagin nodded in the affirmative, and pointing in the direction of Saffron Hill, inquired whether any one was up yonder to-night.

  • She was in her room, the woman said; so Fagin crept softly up stairs, and entered it without any previous ceremony.

  • It would easily have made him beautiful if he had been merely squalid; if he had been a Jew of the Fagin type.

    The Ball and The Cross | G.K. Chesterton

Cultural definitions for Fagin

Fagin

[ (fay-gin) ]


A villain in the novel Oliver Twist, by Charles Dickens. The unscrupulous, miserly Fagin teaches Oliver Twist and other orphaned boys to pick pockets and steal for him.

The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition Copyright © 2005 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.