Word.ws English Dictionary

snake-oil

snake-oil verb: to dupe or con.

Verb

snake-oil (third-person singular simple present snake-oils, present participle snake-oiling, simple past and past participle snake-oiled)

  1. (informal, transitive) To dupe or con.
    • And this is particularly so for many of our women students who have been hustled and snake-oiled to deny the validity of their intellects.1995, Nancy Owen Nelson, editor, Private Voices, Public Lives
    • Before she had a chance to deal with her hangover, he was on the phone snake-oiling her into the first of what would be many ill-fated fraud cases.2013, Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, Vintage, published 2014, page 23

Forms of snake-oil

third-person singular presentsnake-oils
present participlesnake-oiling
past participlesnake-oiled
pastsnake-oiled

Origin of snake-oil

From snake oil.

Questions about snake-oil

What does snake-oil mean?
Snake-oil means to dupe or con.
What part of speech is snake-oil?
Snake-oil is a verb.
What is the past tense of snake-oil?
The past tense of snake-oil is snake-oiled.

Words near snake-oil in the dictionary

  1. snake-grasses
  2. snake-in-the-box problem
  3. snake-killer
  4. snake-necked turtle
  5. snake-necked turtles
  6. snake-oil
  7. snake-oiled
  8. snake-oiling
  9. snake-oils
  10. snake-phobia
  11. snake`lowbar`case

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: snake-oil (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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