grift

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The Word of the Day for March 4 is:

grift   \GRIFT\   verb
     : to obtain (money) illicitly (as in a confidence game)

Example sentence:
     "One Caribbean-based gambling Web site grifted $10,000 in a phony deposit 
scam." (Robert J. Hawkins, _The San Diego Union Tribune_, February 1998)

Did you know?
     "Grift" was born in the argot of the underworld, a realm in which a 
"grifter" might be a pickpocket, a crooked gambler, or a confidence man -- any 
criminal who relied on skill and wits rather than physical violence -- and to 
be "on the grift" was to make a living by stings and clever thefts. "Grift" may 
have evolved from "graft," a slightly older word meaning "to acquire 
dishonestly," but its exact origins are uncertain. We do know that the verb 
"grift" first finagled its way into print in 1915 in George Bronson-Howard's 
God's Man: "Grifting ain't what it used to be. Fourteenth Street's got 
protection down to a system -- a regular underworld tariff on larceny."





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