Word.ws English Dictionary

snake-oiling

snake-oiling is the present participle and gerund of snake-oil.

Meaning of snake-oil

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

Questions about snake-oiling

What is snake-oiling the present participle and gerund of?
Snake-oiling is the present participle and gerund of snake-oil.

Words near snake-oiling in the dictionary

  1. snake-killer
  2. snake-necked turtle
  3. snake-necked turtles
  4. snake-oil
  5. snake-oiled
  6. snake-oiling
  7. snake-oils
  8. snake-phobia
  9. snake`lowbar`case
  10. snake`lowbar`cased
  11. snakebark

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: snake-oiling (page history and authors); 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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “snake-oiling.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/snake-oiling. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.