humbug

Meaning

Noun

1. (slang) A hoax, jest, or prank.
2. (slang) A fraud or sham; (uncountable) hypocrisy.
3. (slang) A cheat, fraudster, or hypocrite.
4. (slang) Nonsense.
5. A type of hard sweet (candy), usually peppermint flavoured with a striped pattern.
6. (slang) Anything complicated, offensive, troublesome, unpleasant or worrying; a misunderstanding, especially if trivial.
7. (slang) A fight.
8. (slang) A gang.
9. (slang) A false arrest on trumped-up charges.
10. (slang) The piglet of the wild boar.

Intj

Balderdash!, nonsense!, rubbish!

Verb

1. (slang) To play a trick on someone, to cheat, to swindle, to deceive.
2. (slang) To fight; to act tough.
3. (obsolete,slang) To waste time talking.

Synonyms

hoax

fraud

deception

sham

cheat

imposture

swindler

dupery

dissimulation

deceit

pretence

swindle

snake oil

impostor

tommyrot

tosh

delusion

trick

gammon

con

taradiddle

hoodwink

trickery

trickster

twaddle

eyewash

hypocrite

cheating

humbuggery

tarradiddle

flim-flam

imposition

imposter

bosh

bilgewater

bilk

claptrap

nonsense

deceive

deceiver

pretender

put-on

baloney

boloney

fraudulence

scam

fudge

dissembler

drivel

gyp

spoof

drool

shortchange

sly joke

snooker

soak

stupidity

swindling

treachery

waffle

🧇

wangle

welch

muck around

hokey-pokey

mumper

affect

jiggery pokery

balderdash

bamboozle

beguilement

bluff

buncombe

bunk

carton

charlatan

chisel

circumvent

circumvention

detour

dissemblance

dupe

eyewater

fake

fallacy

feign

fib

flam

flannel

flimflam

flummery

fob

fool

fortune teller

fox

🦊

gas

gouge

guile

hokum

hoodwinker

hum

hypocrisy

impose

jazz

jockey

juggle

makebelieve

mountebank

mystify

ploy

porky

pretend

pretense

quack

quackery

rogue

rook

screw

shave

Hyphenated as

hum‧bug

Pronounced as (IPA)

/ˈhʌmbʌɡ/

Etymology

Origin unknown; the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) states that “the facts as to its origin appear to have been lost, even before the word became common enough to excite attention”. It has been suggested that the word possibly derives from hummer (“(slang) An obvious lie”), or from hum (“(dialectal and slang) to cajole; delude; impose on”) + bug (“a goblin, a spectre”). In his Slang Dictionary (1864), English bibliophile and publisher John Camden Hotten (1832–1873) suggested a link to the name of the German city of Hamburg, “from which town so many false bulletins and reports came during the war in the last century”, or alternatively a derivation from ambage.
Hotten also said he had traced the earliest occurrence of the word to the title page of Ferdinando Killigrew’s book The Universal Jester (see quotations), which he dated to about 1735–1740. This dating has therefore been adopted by other dictionaries. However, the OED dates the word to about 1750, as the earliest edition of Killigrew’s work has been dated to 1754.