jew down
jew down verb: to bargain or haggle with a seller in order to obtain a lower price for a good or service.
Verb (1)
jew down (third-person singular simple present jews down, present participle jewing down, simple past and past participle jewed down)
- To bargain or haggle with a seller in order to obtain a lower price for a good or service.
- […] the popular and fashionable lying, which is so prolific between merchant and customer, as the process of jewing down is going on among all traders of the day.1861, George W. Henry, Tell Tale Rag, and Popular Sins of the Day, self-published, published 1861, page ix
- Equality, too, removes the possibility of bargaining, of jewing up or jewing down a salary, according to the exigencies of the moment.1906, unnamed university president, quoted in John Maxson Stillman's "Relations of Salary to Title in American Universities", in Journal of Proceedings and Addresses of the Eighth Annual Conference...
- Antonyms:
- jew up
Verb (2) capitalized: Jew down
Jew down (third-person singular simple present Jews down, present participle Jewing down, simple past and past participle Jewed down)
- Alternative spelling of jew down.
- " […] who should come along this mornin' but one of those same holy people, and Jewed me down on pay that the Lord knows is hard enough to live on."1877, John Habberton, Some folks, K. Grädener, page 104
- Incidentally they ask a price much higher than it is worth; they expect to be Jewed down.1906, Thomas Beyer, The American Battleship in Commission as Seen by an Enlisted Man: Also Many Man-o'-war Yarns, Army and Navy Register, page 202
Antonyms of jew down
Forms of jew down
| third-person singular present | jews down |
|---|---|
| present participle | jewing down |
| past participle | jewed down |
| past | jewed down |
| alternative form | Jew down |
| third-person singular present | Jews down |
| present participle | Jewing down |
| past participle | Jewed down |
| past | Jewed down |
Origin of jew down
From the noun Jew, based on the stereotype of Jews as parsimonious and driving hard bargains + down.
Questions about jew down
- What does jew down mean?
- Jew down means to bargain or haggle with a seller in order to obtain a lower price for a good or service.
- What part of speech is jew down?
- Jew down is a verb.
- What is the past tense of jew down?
- The past tense of jew down is jewed down.
Words near jew down in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: jew down (page history and authors); Jew down (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: “jew down.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/jew_down. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.