goldbrick
goldbrick noun: something fraudulent or nonexistent offered for sale; a swindle or con.
Noun
goldbrick (plural goldbricks)
- 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
- These, as a rule, were not adverse to buying a goldbrick as long as they knew that there was a chance for them to dump it on somebody else afterwards with some profit.1932, Rafael De Nogales, Memoirs Of A Soldier Of Fortune, Kessinger Publishing, published 2006, →ISBN, page 98
- 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
- Tell me that I’ve been a louse and loafer
You won’t get a fight here, no ma’am
Say I’m a goldbrick, a goof-off, no good
But that couldn’t be all that I am2004 (written c. 1990), Howard Ashman, Aladdin: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, “Proud of your Boy”
- Synonyms:
- goldbricker
- A swindler.
- Synonyms:
- goldbricker
Verb
goldbrick (third-person singular simple present goldbricks, present participle goldbricking, simple past and past participle goldbricked)
- To shirk or malinger.
- I'd just as soon goldbrick with malaria as with anything else.1961 November 10, Joseph Heller, “The Soldier in White”, in Catch-22 […], New York, N.Y.: Simon and Schuster, →OCLC, page 173
- He learned to despise the Germans, people he once thought fit to rule the world, but now so craven they ate French dirt for a glass of cheap campagne; he mastered the art of goldbricking. Sitting at his desk, bored and full of hate, he got fat and dreamed of Paris.1989, Greil Marcus, “The Assault on Notre-Dame”, in Lipstick Traces, Faber & Faber, published 2009
- To swindle.
Synonyms of goldbrick
Forms of goldbrick
| Noun | |
|---|---|
| plural | goldbricks |
| alternative form | gold-brick |
| alternative form | gold brick |
| Verb | |
| third-person singular present | goldbricks |
| present participle | goldbricking |
| past participle | goldbricked |
| past | goldbricked |
Origin of goldbrick
From gold + brick, originally (1850s) an actual gold ingot or brick, later a swindle that consisted of selling a putative gold brick, which was only coated in gold. The swindle is attested from 1879, the sense “to swindle” is attested 1902, and the sense “to shirk” is attested 1914, popularized as World War I armed forces slang. In early 1900s, used to refer to an unattractive young woman – not pretty, nor able to talk or dance (attested 1903), thence to refer to incompetent enlisted troops at the start of World War I, reinforced by the rank insignia of second lieutenants, which was a gold rectangle.
Words formed from goldbrick
Questions about goldbrick
- What does goldbrick mean?
- Goldbrick means something fraudulent or nonexistent offered for sale; a swindle or con.
- What part of speech is goldbrick?
- Goldbrick can be a noun or a verb.
- What is the plural of goldbrick?
- The plural of goldbrick is goldbricks.
Words near goldbrick in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: 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: “goldbrick.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/goldbrick. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.