chicane
Americannoun
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a bridge or whist hand without trumps
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motor racing a short section of sharp narrow bends formed by barriers placed on a motor-racing circuit to provide an additional test of driving skill
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a less common word for chicanery
verb
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(tr) to deceive or trick by chicanery
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(tr) to quibble about; cavil over
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(intr) to use tricks or chicanery
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of chicane
1665–75; < French chicane (noun), chicaner (v.), perhaps < Middle Low German schikken to arrange
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Could have fought for Q3 but the Nouvelle chicane crash rather ruined the Audi driver's weekend.
From BBC ● Jun. 7, 2026
Hadjar lost control on the entry to the second Swimming Pool chicane, the rear swinging around on entry and spinning him into the barriers on the exit.
From BBC ● Jun. 5, 2026
Isack Hadjar crashed his Red Bull on his own at the final chicane and Pierre Gasly's Alpine was tipped into a somersault by Liam Lawson's Racing Bulls at the final corner.
From BBC ● May 3, 2026
But that was before the Miami Grand Prix moved in—before the artificial marina, the aqua chicane or the race weekends that packed in 275,000 fans.
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 1, 2026
Logic then was jargon, controversy chicane, and truth a shuttlecock, with which the disputants respectively played, or the object which they mutually disguised.
From A Logic Of Facts Or, Every-day Reasoning by Holyoake, George Jacob
Carole Lombard, a $20,000,000 American in Cuba, is sorry Dancer George Raft was chicaned by a counterfeit lottery ticket bearing the same number as her genuine winning ticket.
From Time Magazine Archive
All saw, and too clearly, that we had been chicaned; and that the wretched curs who had “sold” us, were as completely beyond our reach, as if twenty miles lay between us and them!
From The Bandolero A Marriage among the Mountains by Reid, Mayne
The very possibility of public agency, by which such petitions could authentically arrive at Parliament, has been evaded and chicaned away.
From The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 06 (of 12) by Burke, Edmund
I had heard enough to tell me I had been chicaned.
From The Bandolero A Marriage among the Mountains by Reid, Mayne
Chmielnicki, now doubly hateful to the Poles as being both a royalist and a Cossack, was again maltreated and chicaned, and only escaped from gaol by bribing his gaolers.
From Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" by Various
A Judge that goes upon chicaning is to be punished more severely than a highway Robber.
From History of Friedrich II of Prussia — Volume 21 by Carlyle, Thomas
The man who goes to law surrenders his liberty of action and becomes the sport of chicaning lawyers and hair-splitting judges.
From Mr. Fortescue An Andean Romance by Westall, William
The only two openings by which I could enter the temple of fortune were the gate of niggardly economy, or the path of little chicaning bargain-making.
From The Letters of Robert Burns by Burns, Robert
Whereby come Dissident ejected Priests; unconquerable Martyrs according to some, incurable chicaning Traitors according to others.
From The French Revolution by Carlyle, Thomas
But the poor girl had no thought of so chicaning away life; her mind was fixed on far other subjects.
From The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 by Johnson, Rossiter
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
