Definitions

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

  • intransitive verb To deceive by trickery; swindle.
  • intransitive verb To deprive by trickery; defraud.
  • intransitive verb To mislead; fool.
  • intransitive verb To elude; escape.
  • intransitive verb To act dishonestly; practice fraud.
  • intransitive verb To violate rules deliberately, as in a game.
  • intransitive verb Informal To be sexually unfaithful.
  • intransitive verb Sports To position oneself closer to a certain area than is normal or expected.
  • noun An act of cheating; a fraud or swindle.
  • noun One who cheats; a swindler.
  • noun A technique that exploits a flaw or hidden feature in a video game or computer program.
  • noun Law Fraudulent acquisition of another's property.
  • noun Botany Any of several species of brome, especially Bromus secalinus, an annual European grass widespread as a weed.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun See second and third extracts under cheat-bread.
  • noun A thing: usually with a distinctive word: as, a cackling cheat, a fowl; belly-cheat, an apron.
  • To confiscate; escheat.
  • To deceive and defraud; impose upon; trick: followed by of or out of before the thing of which one is defrauded.
  • To mislead; deceive.
  • To elude or escape.
  • To win or acquire by cheating: as, to cheat an estate from one.
  • To effect or accomplish by cheating: as, to cheat one's way through the world; to cheat one into a misplaced sympathy.
  • Synonyms To cozen, gull, chouse, fool, outwit, circumvent, beguile, dupe, inveigle.
  • To act dishonestly; practise fraud or trickery: as, he cheats at cards.
  • noun An escheat; an unexpected acquisition; a windfall.
  • noun A fraud committed by deception; a trick; an imposition; an imposture.
  • noun In law, a fraud is punishable as a cheat only when it deprives another of property (thus, fraudulently inducing a marriage is not termed a cheat);
  • noun when it is not such as to amount to a felony (for then it is more severely punishable); and
  • noun when it is effected by some practice or method, other than mere words, which affects or may affect numbers of persons or the public at large, such as the use of false weights.
  • noun A person who cheats; one guilty of fraud by deceitful practices; a swindler.
  • noun A game at cards, in which the cards are played face downward, the player stating the value of the card he plays (which must always be one higher than that played by the previous player), and being subjected to a penalty if he is discovered stating it wrongly.
  • noun Anything which deceives or is intended to deceive; an illusion; specifically, a false shirt-front. See dicky.
  • noun The sweetbread.
  • noun In botany: The darnel, Lolium temulentum.
  • noun Same as chess.

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

  • noun An act of deception or fraud; that which is the means of fraud or deception; a fraud; a trick; imposition; imposture.
  • noun One who cheats or deceives; an impostor; a deceiver; a cheater.
  • noun (Bot.) A troublesome grass, growing as a weed in grain fields; -- called also chess. See Chess.
  • noun (Law) The obtaining of property from another by an intentional active distortion of the truth.
  • transitive verb To deceive and defraud; to impose upon; to trick; to swindle.
  • transitive verb To beguile.
  • intransitive verb To practice fraud or trickery.
  • noun obsolete Wheat, or bread made from wheat.

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

  • verb intransitive To violate rules in order to gain advantage from a situation.
  • verb intransitive To be unfaithful to one's spouse or partner.
  • verb transitive To manage to avoid something even though it seemed unlikely.
  • verb To deceive; to fool; to trick.
  • noun Someone who cheats (informal: cheater).
  • noun A card game where the goal is to have no cards remaining in a hand, often by telling lies.
  • noun A hidden means of gaining an unfair advantage in a computer game, often by entering a cheat code.

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

  • noun weedy annual grass often occurs in grainfields and other cultivated land; seeds sometimes considered poisonous

Etymologies

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

[Middle English cheten, to confiscate, short for acheten, variant of escheten, from eschete, escheat; see escheat.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Aphetic form of escheat ("the reversion of property to the state if there are no legal claimants"), from Old French

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Examples

  • Some ministers of the Word cheat those they teach—actually steal their joy—by permitting them and often urging them to believe that the bulk of their lives must be shackled to the “secular,” while the “ministers” involve themselves in “the work of God.”

    The God of the Towel Jim McGuiggan 1997

  • Some ministers of the Word cheat those they teach—actually steal their joy—by permitting them and often urging them to believe that the bulk of their lives must be shackled to the “secular,” while the “ministers” involve themselves in “the work of God.”

    The God of the Towel Jim McGuiggan 1997

  • She does not use the word cheat, does not acknowledge the obvious betrayal.

    Between Expectations Md Meghan Maclean Weir 2011

  • Though Wozniacki did not use the word "cheat", she made it perfectly clear that the serial offenders had an unfair advantage over the rest.

    Caroline Wozniacki bemoans grunting opponents who 'do it on purpose' 2011

  • F&S should not have to control cheaters. these guys are just like poachers, "if the DNR catches us, we'll stop". a cheat is a cheat caught or not. it's not about points, to me it's about looking over a lot of junk from the same 3-4 folks to find folks with real answers or questions.

    Giving yourself +1's, should this be possible? 2009

  • She does not use the word cheat, does not acknowledge the obvious betrayal.

    Between Expectations Md Meghan Maclean Weir 2011

  • F&S should not have to control cheaters. these guys are just like poachers, "if the DNR catches us, we'll stop". a cheat is a cheat caught or not. it's not about points, to me it's about looking over a lot of junk from the same 3-4 folks to find folks with real answers or questions.

    Giving yourself +1's, should this be possible? 2009

  • But the Bush administration says has looked for a whole series of what it calls cheat and retreat deception from Iraq, as the United Nations faces the key decision point, as to whether to move to military confrontation.

    CNN Transcript Feb 13, 2003 2003

  • Read about the latest orders (more procedurals, CBS?), copy and paste our title cheat sheet at the end of the item into the comments section, and add your own TAGs (Totally Arbitrary Grades). will play a self-help guru who fails to follow her own advice when she's dumped. than Men in Trees.

    Entertainment Weekly's PopWatch 2009

  • Read the greenlights, copy and paste our title cheat sheet at the end of the item into the comments section, and add your marks.

    Entertainment Weekly's PopWatch 2009

Comments

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  • "I waited for him to hit me, instead he replied, 'She'll probably cheat on you too.'"

    - 'Cowboy', onesentence.org.

    September 2, 2008

  • “A study of cheating among graduate students, published in 2006 in the journal Academy of Management Learning & Education, found that 56 percent of all M.B.A. students cheated regularly — more than in any other discipline.�?

    The New York Times, Is It Time to Retrain B-Schools?, by Kelley Holland, March 14, 2009

    March 15, 2009

  • Regarding WeirdNet's agricultural interests: 'seeds sometimes considered poisonous'? Hasn't anyone got around to checking? (Or are they perhaps poisonous in the sense that potatoes are technically poisonous, i.e. that you'd have to eat an awful lot to get a fatal dose?)

    March 16, 2009

  • I'm sure that what WeirdNet means is that sometimes we silly humans consider them poisonous, but at other times we don't think so after all.

    Silly humans.

    March 16, 2009