Word.ws English Dictionary

spivvery

/ˈspɪvəɹi/

spivvery noun: behaviour characteristic of a spiv; crookery, petty crime.

Noun

spivvery (countable and uncountable, plural spivveries)

  1. Behaviour characteristic of a spiv; crookery, petty crime.
    • The Government decided the issues in accordance with the best principles, he said: "The weak first; and the strong next." Mr. Churchill preferred a free-for-all, but what was Toryism except organised Spivvery?1948 July 4, “Mr Bevan's bitter attack on Tories”, in The Guardian, →ISSN
    • Rome is also a city of spivvery, a city which had a black market before black markets were invented.1956, Kenneth Wolstenholme, Sports Special, page 39

Examples of spivvery in a sentence

  • Slater Walker became synonymous, after the 1973 crash, with City spivvery and the kind of risk-taking excess from which the next generation failed to learn.2015 November 28, Martin Vander Weyer, “Never too late to investigate HBOS”, in The Spectator, page 36:
  • This is spivvery for which you and I pay billions extra just to get minimal services—it can also lead to a financial fragility at the heart of the firms on which Britain now relies.2018 April 23, Aditya Chakrabortty, “Some call it outsourcing. I call it spivvery”, in The Guardian, →ISSN:

Forms of spivvery

pluralspivveries
alternative formspivery

Origin of spivvery

From spiv + -ery.

Questions about spivvery

What does spivvery mean?
Spivvery means behaviour characteristic of a spiv; crookery, petty crime.
How do you use spivvery in a sentence?
Slater Walker became synonymous, after the 1973 crash, with City spivvery and the kind of risk-taking excess from which the next generation failed to learn.
What part of speech is spivvery?
Spivvery is a noun.
How do you pronounce spivvery?
Spivvery is pronounced /ˈspɪvəɹi/.
What is the plural of spivvery?
The plural of spivvery is spivveries.

Words near spivvery in the dictionary

  1. Spiveys
  2. spivias
  3. spivish
  4. spivs
  5. spivveries
  6. spivvery
  7. spivvier
  8. spivviest
  9. spivvily
  10. spivvish
  11. spivvy

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: spivvery (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: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-spivvery.wav.

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