Dicker

/ˈdɪkə(ɹ)/ · verb

Meaning

(intransitive) To bargain, haggle or negotiate over a sale..

Definitions by Sense

1. (intransitive) To bargain, haggle or negotiate over a sale.
2. (intransitive) To barter.
3. (intransitive) To fiddle.
4. (obsolete) A unit of measure, consisting of 10 of some object, particularly hides and skins.
5. (US) A chaffering, barter, or exchange, of small wares.

Example Sentences

At Bouira the detachment detrained, and the balance of the journey was made in the saddle. As Tarzan was dickering at Bouira for a mount he caught a brief glimpse of a man in European clothes eying him from the doorway of a native coffeehouse, […]

In the brilliant sparkle of the morning when everything that was not superlatively blue was superlatively green, I dickered with a man who was taking a party up the inlet that he should drop me off at the village I was headed for.

Then, the white men who penetrated to those semi-wilds were always ready to "dicker" and to "swap," and to "trade" rifles, and watches, and whatever else they might happen to possess, almost to their wives and children.

They sat in a booth near the door and drank the first cold ones of the evening while watching three impassioned pinballers dickering with flashing, promising, tilting machines.

1599, attributed to Thomas Heywood, Edward IV, Part One, Act III, Scene 1, https://books.google.ca/books?id=d_MuAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false Hobs [the Tanner of Tamsworth]. […] My taking is more than my spending, for here's store left. I have spent but a groat; a penny for my two jades, a penny to the poor, a penny pot of ale, and a penny cake for my man and me, a dicker of cowhides cost me.

The dicker, or daker, was ten, and is found, though generally at later times than the period before us, as a measure for hides and gloves.

to make a dicker

“Grant that the North’s insulted, scorned, betrayed, O'erreached in bargains with her neighbor made, When selfish thrift and party held the scales For peddling dicker, not for honest sales,— Whom shall we strike? Who most deserves our blame?

Synonyms for dicker

Antonyms for dicker

Related Words

Word Forms

• dickers
• dickering
• dickered

Usage Notes

Choose a synonym only when it preserves the intended meaning, tone, and grammar of the full sentence.

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