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trick

[trik]

Example Sentences Origin

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noun

a crafty or underhanded device, maneuver, stratagem, or the like, intended to deceive or cheat; artifice; ruse; wile.

an optical illusion: It must have been some visual trick caused by the flickering candlelight.

a roguish or mischievous act; practical joke; prank: She likes to play tricks on her friends.

a mean, foolish, or childish action.

a clever or ingenious device or expedient; adroit technique: the tricks of the trade.

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the art or knack of doing something skillfully: You seem to have mastered the trick of making others laugh.

a clever or dexterous feat intended to entertain, amuse, etc.: He taught his dog some amazing tricks.

a feat of magic or legerdemain: card tricks.

a behavioral peculiarity; trait; habit; mannerism.

10.

a period of duty or turn; stint; tour of duty: I relieved the pilot after he had completed his trick at the wheel.

11.

Cards.

the group or set of cards played and won in one round.

a point or scoring unit.

a card that is a potential winner. Compare honor trick.

12.

Informal. a child or young girl: a pretty little trick.

13.

Slang.

a prostitute's customer.

a sexual act between a prostitute and a customer.

14.

Heraldry.

a preliminary sketch of a coat of arms.

engraver's trick.

COLLAPSE

adjective

15.

of, pertaining to, characterized by, or involving tricks: trick shooting.

16.

designed or used for tricks: a trick chair.

17.

(of a joint) inclined to stiffen or weaken suddenly and unexpectedly: a trick shoulder.

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Trick is one of our favorite verbs.

So is absquatulate. Does it mean:

to flee; abscond:

chat, to converse

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verb (used with object)

18.

to deceive by trickery.

19.

Heraldry. to indicate the tinctures of (a coat of arms) with engraver's tricks.

20.

to cheat or swindle (usually followed by out of): to trick someone out of an inheritance.

21.

to beguile by trickery (usually followed by into).

verb (used without object)

22.

to practice trickery or deception; cheat.

23.

to play tricks; trifle (usually followed by with).

24.

Slang. to engage in sexual acts for hire.

Verb phrase

25.

trick out, Informal. to embellish or adorn with or as if with ornaments or other attention-getting devices.

Idioms

26.

turn the trick, to achieve the desired effect or result: Another turn of the pliers should do the trick.

27.

turn a trick, Slang. (of a prostitute) to engage in a sexual act with a customer.

Origin:
1375–1425; late Middle English trik (noun) < Old North French trique deceit, derivative of trikier to deceive < Vulgar Latin *triccāre, for Latin trīcārī to play tricks

Related forms

trick·er, noun

trick·ing·ly, adverb

out·trick, verb (used with object)

un·tricked, adjective

Synonyms
1. deception. Trick, artifice, ruse, stratagem, wile are terms for crafty or cunning devices that are intended to deceive. Trick, the general term, refers usually to an underhanded act designed to cheat someone, but it sometimes refers merely to a pleasurable deceiving of the senses: to win by a trick. Like trick, but to a greater degree, artifice emphasizes the cleverness, ingenuity, or cunning with which the proceeding is devised: an artifice of diabolical ingenuity. Ruse and stratagem emphasize the purpose for which the trick is designed; ruse is the more general term of the two, and stratagem sometimes implies a more elaborate procedure or a military application: He gained entrance by a ruse. His stratagem gave them command of the hill. Wile emphasizes the disarming effect of the trick upon those who are deceived: His wiles charmed them into trusting him. 18. See cheat.

Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2012.
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Link To trick

Example Sentences

Coming soon to a playing field near you is a trick play so clever it's likely to be imitated on punt returns throughout the land.

Finally, something that's nifty though not exactly a trick.

The trick in getting this right lies in the ability to recognise cognitive limitations and biases.

EXPAND

Coming soon to a playing field near you is a trick play so clever it's likely to be imitated on punt returns throughout the land.

Finally, something that's nifty though not exactly a trick.

The trick in getting this right lies in the ability to recognise cognitive limitations and biases.

The trick to the wasp's subterfuge is the chemical weapons it brings to bear.

Next time you throw a party, try this fun trick with supercooled water.

The trick for me is to find out how the animals really live.

It's a kind of magic trick that makes anything look better.

Once you know the trick and the secret move, practicing is fairly easy.

My trick is to put a towel or heavy wad of paper towels under the part of the tablecloth with the stain.

They're not trying to trip you up or humiliate you or trick you.

Though unpleasant for the doctor, it is a useful trick.

For tufted capuchin monkeys, however, the trick could be a clever way to snatch a free meal.

And there is reference to the phantom limb pain&mirror trick work, and so on.

We tried the same trick with the knife when cutting the rolls, and it worked.

Here is where a professional kitchen trick comes in handy: make an ice water bath.

The rubber hand illusion is more than a vaguely creepy parlor trick.

Coming soon to a playing field near you is a trick play so clever it is likely to be imitated on punt returns throughout the land.

Reading your own work objectively is a trick that some master more easily than others.

But it is still a hard trick to pull off, and it has not happened often.

Optical illusions are images that trick the viewer into seeing something different from what exists in reality.

What is surprising is how little advance setup would do the trick.

Perhaps a nice funnel cake batter would do the trick.

Here, dark-wood surfaces and stainless steel appliances do the trick.

Here's the trick to getting your vehicle moving again.

In a pair tournament scored by match points, every trick can be vital.

The trick was to target their pain areas, and not the whole body or brain.

But there is mounting evidence that governments have missed a trick.

But for now the researchers aren't sure why the cod employ this biological trick.

Uncover this little trick and atomic fusion, though extremely dangerous, will work.

How you actually get the rod to stay on your person is going to be a trick.

It's a kind of magic trick that makes anything look more pulled together.

There is this trick, a trick that burned me in the past.

But the real trick is finding them when they are on the ascent and before they peak.

Whether all the details were right is, at the moment, secondary to whether it does the trick.

The remaining trick was to get home on the remaining fuel.

Instead it is, in a sense, a trick of our perspective.

That's actually a trick filmmakers learned decades ago.

The trick to doing it well, he's learned, is to plan and prep at home.

After centuries, fire and brimstone still do the trick.

The trick to its absorbency is in the way those building-block molecules are arranged.

Any of the really small tabletop tripods will do the trick and don't take up much space in your bag.

It turns out that it is fairly easy to trick us into thinking that someone is looking somewhere else.

The trick here is to keep the supporting colors neutral and allow the vibrant hue to shine.

The economy may do this for you, of course, but it's more impressive to do it yourself as a magic trick.

The brain can often trick you into thinking inanimate objects are part of your body.

The trick is that a heat pump moves heat rather than generating it.

The right plants in pots on a patio can do the trick as well.

The trick here is that you have to train yourself to count symbols instead of interpreting all white spaces as separators.

The trick is knowing exactly how materials alter light that enters them.

The trick is knowing that you are a bad player and be cunning enough to make a disadvantage your advantage.

The fact that they cut out little notches in the path really helps trick your eye into believe that it's stone and not concrete.

However, that trick isn't what earned the species its bloodsucking name.

However, the trick is that the buildings must be built more efficiently.

The trick to getting the cheese to melt before the crust burns is to cover the pan and to keep the heat low.

The trick is getting that long shutter speed in broad daylight.

No amount of brushstroking or knife waving could trick subjects into sweating that a chest-level foot was about to lose a toe.

The trick is making it look so appealing and relaxing.

The trick is often to underexpose the brighter area of a photograph.

Asking subjects to bet on how well they know something is an established trick in neuroeconomics.

Withstanding temptation takes self-discipline-no easy trick when immediate gratification plumps our sense of well-being.

To focus the sound, the trick is to capture these waves at any point on the array.

Houdini performed his trick for startled audiences over and over again.

Amid all the centennial hoopla, the trick is to separate the man from the math.

The first trick of the new imaging process is to image light from a single fluorescent molecule, or fluorophore.

He said he found this a useful trick when addressing restive or sleepy audiences".

As an artist and author, he's visually chronicled the history of novelty prank and magic trick maker.

Like anything, the trick to using it well is to simply use it often.

Conserving energy by following the leader, a trick known as.

Your friend's card will always be the one under the card that was on the bottom of the deck at the beginning of the trick.

Another new trick magnifies fine details normally invisible to lenses.

Working on this kind of thing is a good way to trick yourself into thinking you're a historian.

In more recent times, the triple-A designation has done the trick.

Starving healthy cells helps to differentiate them from tumor cells, a trick that could make cancer treatments more effective.

The dirty trick didn't work and the plague was disastrous for the town.

The trick is that every hop has to be half the length of the last.

The main trick is not to spill beer on the keyboard.

They seem to have subverted a male trick that is intended to ensure paternity rights, and turned it into a trap.

Imagining the act of eating can trick you into eating less.

The part of the brain doing this trick is the newest part of the brain-it's the prefrontal cortex, part of the prefrontal lobe.

The trick is to bail out when rates are bottoming out.

The trick is to manipulate the way in which the camera captures and stores information.

Instead, the orchids trick insects into performing the task without reward.

The trick to getting them to rebloom is to allow them to experience cool night temperatures, in the mid-50s, in the fall.

Avoid trying this trick in drafty rooms, outdoors, or anywhere with poor lighting.

The trick is to be non-confrontational and non-threatening while saying as little as possible.

His firm has borrowed a trick used by fog-basking beetles and in the nostrils of camels for a novel desalination plant.

Mimicry is a well-known trick in the animal kingdom.

The trick is that raisins need hot, dry weather to suck out all that juicy moisture.

Scammers use a simple trick to include your bank's name in front of their own web site name.

Just listening to what others say might do the trick.

Playing on fears of foreign involvement is an old trick.

Now, scientific findings suggest that dogs' chow-time cunning could be the oldest trick in the book.

The trick is to find a donor cell that starts the egg dividing and that yields perpetual stem cells.

The trick in both cases, was tipping the blocks sideways so that their open spaces become integral to the design.

The trick for locating the position of the hidden sun is to detect polarization, the orientation of light waves along their path.

The trick is capturing future savings to invest in rehabilitation now.

The trick is to stop and watch for it-and have your camera ready.

The trick in this case is to define what determines an obsession in an early stage and address it with counter.

But the slime mold's bacterial-farming trick takes it into a whole new realm.

The trick is to know which is which, and to try and strengthen the weaker areas.

The confidence trick at the heart of the social order was violently laid bare:.

There had been mutterings that the plan was nothing more than a trick to steal the insurgents' land.

The trick is deciphering which blood vessels are normal and which are not.

The trick is not in using software but in proper technique.

It doesn't satisfy depth perception but will trick a casual glance.

They had perforation, but they would do the trick anyway.

The real trick is to organise yourself so that your supplier and your supplier's supplier also hear that ring.

Actually, getting the combines to line up is no trick at all.

The first trick to balancing a ceiling fan is mark each blade with a bit of tape.

He used a trick called functional magnetic-resonance.

The trick for me is to not let my frustrations lead me to overdo it as this can result in me getting sick.

The trick is that they carefully control where the ice forms.

The trick is to devise adequate sun shields with roofs, awnings.

The trick remaining is to identify exactly which ones.

The trick is that as they do so, they make the low-concentration streams of water electrically charged.

The trick is to trap the right amount of heat, but not too much.

That, allied to the laws of optics and some heavy-duty computer power, seems to do the trick.

They have a cool trick to help them move up and down.

The trick is figuring out how these categories match up with new discoveries in the brain sciences.

Some digitally created images are created to enhance a mood, or to trick people.

The trick is to ensure that the fruit does not become ethylene-insensitive so that it never ripens.

The trick is to get the crocodiles or alligators to bite the bar.

Borrowing a trick from the textile industry, though, could provide a solution.

But, if you were cagey enough to do the rewinding the film trick, then maybe you'd be up for this trick.

Yet this conjuring trick produced only a single dimension of highly warped space.

But exactly how the drug manages this multiplication trick has proved difficult to pin down.

They are one of the few mammals that can use sound to navigate--a trick called echolocation.

Forget the neon, pseudo-punk graphics and trick sticks flooding the snowboard industry.

COLLAPSE

Collins

World English Dictionary

trick (trɪk)

—n
1.	a deceitful, cunning, or underhand action or plan
2.	a. a mischievous, malicious, or humorous action or plan; joke: the boys are up to their tricks again
	b. (as modifier): a trick spider
3.	an illusory or magical feat or device
4.	a simple feat learned by an animal or person
5.	an adroit or ingenious device; knack: a trick of the trade
6.	a behavioural trait, habit, or mannerism
7.	a turn or round of duty or work
8.	cards
	a. a batch of cards containing one from each player, usually played in turn and won by the player or side that plays the card with the highest value
	b. a card that can potentially win a trick
9.	slang (Austral) can't take a trick to be consistently unsuccessful or unlucky
10.	informal do the trick to produce the right or desired result
11.	slang how's tricks? how are you?
12.	slang turn a trick (of a prostitute) to gain a customer

—vb
13.	to defraud, deceive, or cheat (someone), esp by means of a trick

[C15: from Old Northern French trique, from trikier to deceive, from Old French trichier, ultimately from Latin trīcārī to play tricks]

'tricker

—n

'trickless

—*adj*

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition
2009 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009
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Etymonline

Word Origin & History

trick

c.1412, "a cheat, a mean ruse," from O.N.Fr. trique "trick, deceit, treachery, cheating," from trikier "to deceive, to cheat," variant of O.Fr. trichier, probably from V.L. *triccare, from L. tricari "be evasive, shuffle," from tricæ "trifles, nonsense, a tangle of difficulties," of unknown origin.

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Meaning "a roguish prank" is recorded from 1590; sense of "the art of doing something" is first attested 1611. The verb is first attested 1595. An earlier sense of "to dress, adorn" (c.1500) is perhaps a different word entirely. Meaning "prostitute's client" is first attested 1915; earlier it was U.S. slang for "a robbery" (1865). Trickery is first attested 1800; tricky is 1786 (earlier tricksy, 1596); trickster is from 1711. Trick-or-treat is recorded from 1947.

COLLAPSE

American Heritage

Idioms & Phrases

trick

In addition to the idioms beginning with trick, also see bag of tricks; confidence game (trick); dirty tricks; do the trick; hat trick; how's tricks; not miss a trick; teach an old dog new tricks; that does it (the trick); turn a trick; up to one's old tricks.