dicker

present singular third person dickers · participle present dickering · participle past dickered · past dickered

1. intransitiveTo bargain, haggle or negotiate over a sale.

   In the brilliant sparkle of the morning when everything that was not superlatively blue was superlatively green, I dickered with a man who was taking a party up the inlet that he should drop me off at the village I was headed for.

   1941, Emily Carr, chapter 6, in Klee Wyck

   1 more example

   At Bouira the detachment detrained, and the balance of the journey was made in the saddle. As Tarzan was dickering at Bouira for a mount he caught a brief glimpse of a man in European clothes eying him from the doorway of a native coffeehouse, […]

   1913 June–December, Edgar Rice Burroughs, “The Dancing Girl of Sidi Aissa”, in The Return of Tarzan, New York, N.Y.: A[lbert] L[evi] Burt Company, […], published March 1915, →OCLC, page 88

2. intransitiveTo barter.

   Then, the white men who penetrated to those semi-wilds were always ready to "dicker" and to "swap," and to "trade" rifles, and watches, and whatever else they might happen to possess, almost to their wives and children.

   1848, James Fenimore Cooper, chapter 2, in The Oak Openings

3. intransitiveTo fiddle.

   They sat in a booth near the door and drank the first cold ones of the evening while watching three impassioned pinballers dickering with flashing, promising, tilting machines.

   1981, Jack Cady, Singleton

plural dickers

1. countableobsoleteuncountableA unit of measure, consisting of 10 of some object, particularly hides and skins.

   The dicker, or daker, was ten, and is found, though generally at later times than the period before us, as a measure for hides and gloves.

   1866, James Edwin Thorold Rogers, A History of Agriculture and Prices in England, volume 1, page 171

   1 more example

   1599, attributed to Thomas Heywood, Edward IV, Part One, Act III, Scene 1, https://books.google.ca/books?id=d_MuAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false Hobs [the Tanner of Tamsworth]. […] My taking is more than my spending, for here's store left. I have spent but a groat; a penny for my two jades, a penny to the poor, a penny pot of ale, and a penny cake for my man and me, a dicker of cowhides cost me.

2. UScountableuncountableA chaffering, barter, or exchange, of small wares.

   to make a dicker

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   “Grant that the North’s insulted, scorned, betrayed, O'erreached in bargains with her neighbor made, When selfish thrift and party held the scales For peddling dicker, not for honest sales,— Whom shall we strike? Who most deserves our blame?

   1856, John Greenleaf Whittier, The Panorama