Word.ws English Dictionary

snake oil

snake oil noun: a fraudulent, ineffective potion or nostrum; panacea.

Noun

snake oil (uncountable)

  1. (idiomatic) A fraudulent, ineffective potion or nostrum; panacea.
  2. A traditional Chinese medicine used to treat joint pain.
  3. A type of 19th-century patent medicine sold in the United States that claimed to contain snake fat, supposedly a Native American remedy for various ailments.
  4. (idiomatic) Any product with exaggerated marketing but questionable or unverifiable quality.
    • As for the IRP, Secretary of State Grant Shapps continues to peddle snake oil, smoke and mirrors. His reaction to near-universal IRP condemnation from politicians, local and national media, and all but a few rail specialists was to dismiss the lot of us (in the condescending and patronising tone we...2022 January 12, Nigel Harris, “Comment: Unhappy start to 2022”, in RAIL, number 948, page 3

snake oil meaning in Bengali

snake oil in Bengali

একটি প্রতারণামূলক, অকার্যকর ওষুধ, টোটকা, সর্বরোগহর ঔষধ

Words formed from snake oil

Questions about snake oil

What does snake oil mean?
Snake oil means a fraudulent, ineffective potion or nostrum; panacea.
What is snake oil in Bengali?
Snake oil in Bengali is একটি প্রতারণামূলক, অকার্যকর ওষুধ, টোটকা. See Snake oil meaning in Bengali.
What part of speech is snake oil?
Snake oil is a noun.

Words near snake oil in the dictionary

  1. snake lizards
  2. snake mackerel
  3. snake mackerels
  4. snake melon
  5. snake melons
  6. snake oil
  7. snake oil salesman
  8. snake oil salesmen
  9. snake out
  10. snake palm
  11. Snake Pass

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: snake oil (page history and authors); snake oil (Bengali Wiktionary) (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-snake oil.ogg.

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