quackery
Americannoun
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of quackery
Explanation
Quackery is when someone pretends to have experience or knowledge, especially in the field of medicine. It's quackery when someone poses as a doctor. If a person fakes being a medical doctor, that's quackery. You can also call it quackery when a company sells an herb or supplement or diet aid that doesn't actually do anything. Some doctors feel that any alternative medicine is nothing but quackery, while others believe that some of these things — like meditation or acupuncture — really work for patients. Quackery is from the 1690's, from a Dutch root word, quacksalver, "hawker of salve."
Vocabulary lists containing quackery
Whirligig
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The Souls of Black Folk, Ch. 1, "Our Spiritual Strivings" by W.E.B. Du Bois
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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:
As a young mother, she rejected traditional medicine in favor of homeopathy, then thought to be a form of quackery.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Feb. 27, 2026
And that is alarming, because Kennedy is a charlatan who opposes evidence-based medicine and promotes discredited quackery.
From Slate ● Jun. 27, 2025
“It’s just mythology. There was a time when that stuff was really popular. It was the major psychiatric quackery of our time.”
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 7, 2024
For years, diet drugs were viewed as vanity treatments or outright quackery, and many were pulled from the market because of dangerous side effects, including death.
From Washington Post ● Dec. 19, 2022
His nutritional quackery even led him to monitor her regularity like a doctor, and some of their biggest fights came as a result of his interrogating Lina about her stools.
From "Middlesex: A Novel" by Jeffrey Eugenides
We live in a land of abounding quackeries and if we do not learn how to laugh, we succumb to the melancholy disease which afflicts the race of viewers-with-alarm.
From Salon ● Feb. 22, 2024
The 860 farm families surveyed last year paid out an average of $104.94 each for doctors, nurses, hospital care, medicines, quackeries.
From Time Magazine Archive
Beautiful, energetic and not entirely scrupulous, Victoria and her younger sister Tennessee practiced many of the popular quackeries of the day: seances, psychic remedies, a bottled "elixir of life."
From Time Magazine Archive
Meanwhile the camera, true to the best British cinema traditions, is out to explore the quirks and quackeries of local society.
From Time Magazine Archive
The vulgar quackeries drop off, atrophied, one after another.
From Medical Essays, 1842-1882 by Holmes, Oliver Wendell
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.
