Word.ws English Dictionary

bait-and-switch

bait-and-switch adjective: relating to use of bait and switch (offering one attractive exchange initially, but not honoring the offer) in business, politics, and elsewhere.

Adjective

bait-and-switch (not comparable)

  1. Relating to use of bait and switch (offering one attractive exchange initially, but not honoring the offer) in business, politics, and elsewhere.
    • Despite Healy's argument that the Liberty Fund would go to worthwhile causes, many felt the Red Cross had deliberately misled donors by using September 11th in a bait-and-switch ploy.2001 November 14, Jessica Reaves, “Red Faces at the Red Cross”, in Time
    • The FTC commissioner, Rohit Chopra, called AT&T’s actions a “massive fraud”. “AT&T’s bait-and-switch scam is a good window into the many harms that result from dominant companies operating without the discipline of meaningful competition,” Chopra said in a statement.2019 November 5, Rohit Chopra, quotee, “'Bait-and-switch scam': AT&T fined $60m over data throttling allegations”, in The Guardian

Verb

bait-and-switch (third-person singular simple present bait-and-switches, present participle bait-and-switching, simple past and past participle bait-and-switched)

  1. (transitive) To exploit using bait and switch.
    • Perhaps the most baffling and frustrating feature of the mortgage mess is that, to my knowledge, the House Financial Services Committee never held public hearings in which bait-and-switched homeowners testified as to how their mortgage payments doubled in just a few years[…]2009, Jane White, America, Welcome to the Poorhouse […] , FT Press, →ISBN, page 64
    • To my surprise, even shock, both of them spent the entire trip sputtering and whining—about being bait-and-switched when their employee-ownership shares of United Airlines had been evaporated by its recent bankruptcy, […]2020 August 7, Kurt Andersen, “College-Educated Professionals Are Capitalism’s Useful Idiots”, in The Atlantic

Forms of bait-and-switch

third-person singular presentbait-and-switches
present participlebait-and-switching
past participlebait-and-switched
pastbait-and-switched

Questions about bait-and-switch

What does bait-and-switch mean?
Bait-and-switch means relating to use of bait and switch (offering one attractive exchange initially, but not honoring the offer) in business, politics, and elsewhere.
What part of speech is bait-and-switch?
Bait-and-switch can be an adjective or a verb.

Words near bait-and-switch in the dictionary

  1. bait cars
  2. bait dog
  3. bait dogs
  4. bait money
  5. bait up
  6. bait-and-switch
  7. bait-and-switched
  8. bait-and-switches
  9. bait-and-switching
  10. bait-cord
  11. baitable

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bait-and-switch (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “bait-and-switch.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bait-and-switch. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.