grifter
Americannoun
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a person who operates a side show at a circus, fair, etc., especially a gambling attraction.
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a swindler, dishonest gambler, or the like.
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of grifter
Explanation
A grifter is a con artist: someone who swindles people out of money through fraud. If there's one type of person you don't want to trust, it's a grifter: someone who cheats others out of money. Grifters are also known as chiselers, defrauders, gougers, scammers, swindlers, and flim-flam men. Selling a bridge and starting a Ponzi scheme are things a grifter might do. The difference between a grifter and a thief is a grifter tricks you out of money through lies, while the thief takes it by force. The end result is the same.
Vocabulary lists containing grifter
"A Novelist Who Made Crime an Art, and His Bad Guys ‘Fun’"
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The Girls I've Been
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The Wrong Way Home
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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:
After meeting Skalnik, Ms. Colloff thought the grifter would acknowledge his duplicity, before she came to believe that he simply saw her as his latest mark.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 10, 2026
Your uncle was a grifter who spent his mother’s money.
From MarketWatch ● Oct. 9, 2025
As evil as he appears to be, he also appears to many across the world as an aging grifter whose only redeeming quality is his single-minded resolve.
From Salon ● Mar. 13, 2025
Smyth’s case has similarities to Anna Sorokin, a grifter convicted in New York of paying for a lavish lifestyle by impersonating a wealthy German heiress.
From Seattle Times ● Apr. 16, 2024
Low Key, who was a grifter from Minnesota, smiled his scarred smile.
From "American Gods" by Neil Gaiman
Gil Blas, a Spaniard born without social standing, becomes caught up with grifters and is obliged to live by his wits.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Feb. 9, 2026
The rush of pseudoscientists, grifters, wellness influencers, and celebrity advocates into the space only made the chronic Lyme debate more fraught.
From Slate ● Dec. 19, 2025
Much of what gets marketed as "wellness," by Kennedy and other grifters, is actively bad for people's health.
From Salon ● Dec. 20, 2024
The next, we despise celebrities, love outlaws, militants and misfits, and reject grifters like Shaun King and Michael Rapaport, both of whom have used Black culture opportunistically and talk too unabashedly on Twitter.
From Los Angeles Times ● May 10, 2024
Chaos had followed the fall of the South, just as war-ravaged societies always attract thieves and grifters.
From "The Best of Enemies" by Osha Gray Davidson
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.
