Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun One who sells wares or provisions in the street; a peddler or hawker.
  • noun One who uses aggressive, showy, and sometimes devious methods to promote or sell a product.
  • noun Informal One who writes advertising copy, especially for radio or television.
  • intransitive verb To sell; peddle.
  • intransitive verb To promote or attempt to sell (a commercial product, for example) in an overaggressive or showy manner.
  • intransitive verb To haggle over; deal in.
  • intransitive verb To sell or promote something.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A retailer of small articles; a hawker; a peddler; now, especially, a small dealer in agricultural produce.
  • noun A wholesale fish-dealer; one who buys fresh fish for shipment to the retail trade.
  • To deal in small articles or in petty bargains; hence, to higgle; contend in a small or mean way about monetary transactions.
  • To expose for sale; make a matter of bargain.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun A retailer of small articles, of provisions, and the like; a peddler; a hawker.
  • noun A mean, trickish fellow.
  • intransitive verb To deal in small articles, or in petty bargains.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A peddler or hawker, who sells small items, either door-to-door, from a stall, or in the street
  • noun Somebody who sells things in an aggressive or showy manner.
  • noun One who deceptively sells fraudulent products.
  • noun Somebody who writes advertisements for radio or television.
  • verb intransitive To haggle, to wrangle, or to bargain.
  • verb transitive To sell or offer goods from place to place, to peddle.
  • verb transitive To promote/sell goods in an aggressive/ showy manner.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • verb sell or offer for sale from place to place
  • noun a person who writes radio or tv advertisements
  • verb wrangle (over a price, terms of an agreement, etc.)
  • noun a seller of shoddy goods

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English, probably of Low German origin; akin to Middle Dutch hokester.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Middle English hukster, from Middle Dutch hokester, itself from hoeken ("to peddle"); compare hawkster.

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Examples

  • So long as a cadger [from the Scandinavian word for "huckster"] is generous in turn (though not necessarily in kind), he ought not to be considered a deadbeat, freeloader, or sponger.

    Boing Boing 2008

  • A prop-betting huckster is making sure all his bets are +EV, and is very calculating about how to play the social aspects to encourage people to make - EV bets.

    Beating the Odds: Why Do People Insist on Even Bets?, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty 2009

  • Al Sharpton - It says alot about the Democratic party that this race-baiting huckster is even allowed on stage, let alone taken seriously.

    Balloon Juice » 2004 » January 2004

  • Trippi then goes into how he believes the Internet can be used for politics, and he takes the usual stands and cites the usual suspects, what a lot of us call the huckster crowd, Dave Winer, Howard Rheingold, Doc Searls and the rest.

    Archive 2004-07-01 2004

  • A clear understanding of what is meant by the word huckster is crucial.

    AlterNet.org Main RSS Feed Guernica Theodore Ross 2010

  • A clear understanding of what is meant by the word huckster is crucial.

    AlterNet.org Main RSS Feed Guernica Theodore Ross 2010

  • His use of the unclassical and perhaps anachronistic word "huckster" shows us both what he takes from and brings to Kabir's poetry, which is to allow his own poetic mind to take off from the basic message and conceptual frame of Kabir's Hindi lines, without hankering after a word-for-word fidelity.

    When Mysticism Came Down to Earth Chandrahas Choudhury 2011

  • When I've managed to get to a con, I'll end up going to some of the panels and the movies, but I also spend a great deal of time at something which, in my heyday, was called the huckster's room but is now more commonly known as the dealer's room, window shopping.

    Why Con? jimhines 2010

  • The huckster is a very good and formidable candidate.

    ARG: Hillary Barely Ahead Of Obama In NH, Before Iowa Caucus Was Held 2009

  • In rural areas, grocers dispatched so-called huckster wagons to the country to sell canned goods and prepared foods, and customers were dependent on when these wagons arrived and what they carried.

    Forbes.com: News Nicole Perlroth 2009

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