cozen
/ˈkʌz(ə)n
/verb [with object] literary
1Trick or deceive: do not think to cozen your contemporaries...
- This is how the deceivers are deceived, for he who can cozen me is shrewd indeed.
- To be fair, the book is not a pulp romance, although it cozens its readers with the content of pulp romance.
- Composition rights are subdivided into publishing rights, which record companies often cozen the unsuspecting into signing away.
1.1Obtain by deception: he was able to cozen a profit...
- There, world domination, monetary and military, is cozened.
Derivatives
cozenage
/ noun ...- Among the most piercing remarks that may be levelled against a journalist is that she perpetrated any form of cozenage upon the readership.
- It's all just a cozenage to make us do more work because the teachers are inconceivably masochistic.
- One of the cozenages he learned was to apparently read a deck of cards from the back without a miss.
cozener
- Its characters are all louche brutes, cozeners and wheedlers - all save the heroine, Bradshaw.
- They are ‘cozeners’ who defraud their victims of money and household goods.
- The usurer will go on hanging the cozener as long as we have a society based, in part, on usury.
Origin
Late 16th century: perhaps from obsolete Italian cozzonare 'to cheat', from cozzone 'middleman, broker', from Latin cocio 'dealer'.