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Definitions

hornswoggle

[hawrn-swog-uhl] / ˈhɔrnˌswɒg əl /
VERB
cheat
Synonyms
Antonyms
STRONG
be honest


Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

See Examples For:

The only sensible conclusion from all of this is that the superrich will settle, plead or hornswoggle their way out of any attempt to cancel their status.

From Washington Post ● Sep. 17, 2019

Music business compromise can be disheartening, but it is not without its perks: It can bolster an artist’s ego, provide financial succor, hornswoggle the masses.

From New York Times ● Dec. 6, 2017

Then you also have good reason to take in this entertaining hornswoggle of a movie.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 7, 2016

The slick city men hornswoggle him when he plays the stock market.

From Time Magazine Archive

"And you let 'em hornswoggle you into takin' it?" demanded the Cap'n.

From The Skipper and the Skipped Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul by Holman Day

Mays jokes he said yes because “it was only fair after I hornswoggled Darko into ‘Amadeus.’

From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 11, 2026

“I used to believe this. Now? I am not convinced that they ever did and that news consumers like my younger self were not hornswoggled in some fashion to think that was true.”

From Washington Post ● Mar. 20, 2018

Perhaps some elegant sidestep remains around the present sensation of being hornswoggled into a symbolic-status Hunger Games in which the scramble for cred is a top-down bloodbath of “creative destruction.”

From Slate ● Oct. 1, 2013

Denim for a City That Takes a Tough Hide AS the water line crept higher and higher in the bathtub, it was hard not to think I had been hornswoggled.

From New York Times ● Apr. 13, 2010

You remember I was down in Tia Juana, that time I got hornswoggled out o' five hundred dollars by Gerald Wynn.

From Owen Clancy's Happy Trail or, The Motor Wizard in California by Burt L. Standish

As a bit of journalistic hornswoggling, the story was a trifle compared to the deftly executed creation by George Plimpton of a real phenom: Sidd Finch, a mystical, Harvard-educated pitcher with a 168 mile-per-hour fastball.

From New York Times ● Mar. 24, 2012

One weekend, Hilda invited to Rackham, with the idea of hornswoggling them into buying the place, gouty Lord Mere de Beaurivage and Lord Hamilcar Hellup, a retired U. S. millionaire.

From Time Magazine Archive

"The West is hornswoggling itself because of a passionate desire to believe the situation is radically altered," says Midge Decter, executive director of the Committee for the Free World.

From Time Magazine Archive

Next winter again there may be hornswoggling for Hornsby.

From Time Magazine Archive

His greatest hornswoggling of the "lie"-hurlers was a drawing of Charles Augustus Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis bearing the caption: "Lindbergh was the 67th man to make a non-stop flight over the Atlantic Ocean."

From Time Magazine Archive


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