Word.ws English Dictionary

bunco

/ˈbʌŋkəʊ/

bunco noun: a swindle or confidence trick.

Noun

bunco (countable and uncountable, plural buncos or buncoes)

  1. (US, slang) A swindle or confidence trick.
  2. (uncountable) A parlour game played in teams with three dice, originating in England but popular among suburban women in the United States at the beginning of the 21st century.
  3. A brigand.
    • When they fall into the hands of the Buncoes, they sometimes do; at others, they are merely robbed or held to ransom for a time and then released again.1891, “Buncoed”, in Chamber's Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts, W & R Chambers, page 781
    • Furthermore, he knew of the O.M. and of how the O.M. was the smoking gun and his outrageous guilt was the key to bringing down every one of the underhanded and dishonest buncoes that were running extreme and eopidemic in Edmonton back then.2014, Gary Tetterington, edited by Rebecca Faith Grossman, Condition Other Than Normal: Finding Peace in a World Gone Mad, eBookIt.com, →ISBN

Verb

bunco (third-person singular simple present buncos, present participle buncoing, simple past and past participle buncoed)

  1. (US, intransitive, slang, transitive) To swindle (someone).
    • They felt very sorry (so they said) for the poor old eleventh company having been buncoed into taking such an awful pack of useless recruits.1910, Erwin Rosen, In the Legion, HTML edition, The Gutenberg Project, published 2012
    • "They want a man who will bunko the ignorant patients and get the money."1930, Jefferis & Nichols, Safe Counsel or Practical Eugenics, page 275

Forms of bunco

Noun
pluralbuncos
pluralbuncoes
alternative formbunko
Verb
third-person singular presentbuncos
present participlebuncoing
past participlebuncoed
pastbuncoed

Origin of bunco

Reportedly from Spanish banca, a card game.

Words formed from bunco

Words that rhyme with bunco

Questions about bunco

What does bunco mean?
Bunco means a swindle or confidence trick.
What part of speech is bunco?
Bunco can be a noun or a verb.
How do you pronounce bunco?
Bunco is pronounced /ˈbʌŋkəʊ/.
What is the plural of bunco?
The plural of bunco is buncos.

Words near bunco in the dictionary

  1. bunchlets
  2. Bunchrew
  3. bunchy
  4. bunchy top
  5. buncing
  6. bunco
  7. bunco-steerer
  8. bunco-steerers
  9. buncoed
  10. buncoes
  11. buncoing

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bunco (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-bunco.ogg.

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