''dicker'' ▫ᴱᴺ Entries

↩ 🔳 🔳 🔳

---

Primary

⁀➴

''dicker'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260127004310-00-⌔

dicker - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Verb

dicker (third-person singular simple present dickers, present participle dickering, simple past and past participle dickered)

• (intransitive) To bargain, haggle or negotiate over a sale.
  • ✤ 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, […]¹
  • ✤ 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.²
• (intransitive) To 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.³
• (intransitive) To 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.⁴

Noun

dicker (countable and uncountable, plural dickers)

• (obsolete) A unit of measure, consisting of 10 of some object, particularly hides and skins.
  • ✤ 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.⁵
  • ✤ 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.⁶
• (US) A chaffering, barter, or exchange, of small wares.
  • ✤ *to make a dicker *
  • ✤ “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?⁷

Etymology

From Middle English diker (“measure of ten”), from Late Latin dacra (“a dicker”), from Latin decuria (“a ten of something”), from decem (“ten”).⁸

Pronunciation

• Audio (US): 🔊
• (Received Pronunciation) enPR: dĭkə(r), IPA: /ˈdɪkə(ɹ)/
• (General American) enPR: dĭkər, IPA: /ˈdɪkɚ/
• Rhymes: -ɪkə(ɹ)

Printed 2026-06-28.

(echo:: @ ⌗)

Footnotes

1. 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. 1941, Emily Carr, chapter 6, in Klee Wyck ‎${}^{[1]}$: ↩

3. 1848, James Fenimore Cooper, chapter 2, in The Oak Openings ‎${}^{[2]}$: ↩

4. 1981, Jack Cady, Singleton: ↩

5. 1599, attributed to Thomas Heywood, Edward IV, Part One, Act III, Scene 1, [3] ↩

6. 1866, James Edwin Thorold Rogers, A History of Agriculture and Prices in England, volume 1, page 171: ↩

7. 1856, John Greenleaf Whittier, The Panorama ‎${}^{[4]}$: ↩

8. Skeat, Walter William. “Dicker, Daykyr” in Notes on English Etymology. ↩

Link to original

Secondary

• • •

---