Word.ws English Dictionary

gold-brick

gold-brick is the alternative form of goldbrick.

Meaning of goldbrick

Noun

goldbrick (plural goldbricks)

  1. Something fraudulent or nonexistent offered for sale; a swindle or con.
    • Experience is the biggest gold brick in the world. All older people have it for sale.1920, F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Smart Set, January 1920, collected in Tales of the Jazz Age
  2. (US, dated, slang) A shirker or malingerer.
    • Mac, there’s not a confounded thing wrong with you. You are an excellent physical specimen and in good health. You’re nothing but a goldbrick. Now, get your butt out of here and don’t ever come back again unless you’re really sick or need an immunization.1945, Dr. Charley Haly, quoted in Doc: heroic stories of medics, corpsmen, and surgeons in combat by Mark R. Littleton, p. 68
    Synonyms:
    goldbricker
  3. (US, dated, slang) A swindler.
    Synonyms:
    goldbricker

See all 5 meanings of goldbrick

Forms of gold-brick

Noun
pluralgold-bricks
Verb
third-person singular presentgold-bricks
present participlegold-bricking
past participlegold-bricked
pastgold-bricked

Questions about gold-brick

What is gold-brick the alternative form of?
Gold-brick is the alternative form of goldbrick.

Words near gold-brick in the dictionary

  1. gold-beater's skin
  2. gold-beaters
  3. gold-beating
  4. gold-breasted trumpeter
  5. gold-breasted trumpeters
  6. gold-brick
  7. gold-bricked
  8. gold-bricker
  9. gold-brickers
  10. gold-bricking
  11. gold-bricks

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: gold-brick (page history and authors); goldbrick (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: “gold-brick.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/gold-brick. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.