Word of the Day:
finagle
What It Means
To obtain, arrange, or achieve by indirect, complicated and/or intensive efforts.
To obtain, arrange, or achieve by deceitful methods, by trickery.
To cheat or swindle; to use crafty, deceitful methods. (often with "out of" preceding the object)
finagled his way out of a ticket by pretending to be on the way to a funeral, distraught
Finagle in Context
“Down the third-floor hallway, she noticed that the police tape had been removed from George Vandercloop's door. Did that mean Sunrise Village was now free to rent it to a new tenant? She tried the door knob and found it locked. Not that she expected she'd find anything more in the apartment than...”
Did You Know?
Americanism from the 1920s, perhaps combining an alteration of fainaigue (“to renege”) with the suffix + -le (“frequentative”), possibly influenced by inveigle; compare haggle.
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: finagle (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “finagle.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/finagle. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
