Word.ws English Dictionary

parlour trick

parlour trick noun: a piece of trickery or falsehood, especially a trivial one.

Noun

parlour trick (plural parlour tricks)

  1. (figuratively) A piece of trickery or falsehood, especially a trivial one.
  2. Synonym of party trick (“a trick performed for entertainment”).
    • You may be nearly omnipotent—and I don't deny that your parlor tricks are very impressive—but morality? I don't see it.1992, René Echevarria, “True Q”, in Star Trek: The Next Generation, season 6, episode 6, spoken by Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Steward)
    Synonyms:
    party trick

Synonyms of parlour trick

Forms of parlour trick

pluralparlour tricks

Questions about parlour trick

What does parlour trick mean?
Parlour trick means a piece of trickery or falsehood, especially a trivial one.
What part of speech is parlour trick?
Parlour trick is a noun.
What is the plural of parlour trick?
The plural of parlour trick is parlour tricks.

Words near parlour trick in the dictionary

  1. parlour palms
  2. parlour pink
  3. parlour pinks
  4. parlour skate
  5. parlour skates
  6. parlour trick
  7. parlour tricks
  8. parlour-game
  9. parlour-games
  10. parlourish
  11. parlourless

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: parlour trick (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: “parlour trick.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/parlour_trick. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.