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chump

nounverbverbattested in dialogue

  • //t͡ʃʌmp//

An incompetent person, a blockhead; a loser.

noun

  1. 1

    An incompetent person, a blockhead; a loser.

    That chump wouldn't know his ass from a hole in the ground.

    What chumps! Didn’t they realize that all they had to do was interpret the constitutional term “the Legislature” to mean “the people”?

  2. 2

    A gullible person; a sucker; someone easily taken advantage of; someone lacking common sense.

    It shouldn't be hard to put one over on that chump.

    Ralph Wiggum is generally employed as a bottomless fount of glorious non sequiturs, but in “I Love Lisa” he stands in for every oblivious chump who ever deluded himself into thinking that with persistence, determination, and a pure heart he can win the girl of his dreams.

  3. 3

    The thick end, especially of a piece of wood or of a joint of meat.

    Shaped as if they had been unskilfully cut off the chump-end of something.

  4. 4

    obsoleteA person's head or face.

Etymology

Origin uncertain; probably a blend of chunk and lump or stump, or perhaps a nasalised variant of chub (“someone chubby, something thick”). Compare Icelandic kubbur (“block of wood, chip (computing)”), Old Norse kumbr for kubbr (“block of wood”), English chop.

verb

  1. 1

    slangTo treat (someone) as a chump; to defraud or swindle (someone).

verb

  1. 1

    Variant of chompdatedDated form of chomp.

    At a neighbouring table two Germans were making a hearty meal, chumping the meat and smacking their lips in a kind of heavy ecstasy.

Etymology

Variant of chomp, itself a variant of champ (“to bite”). More at champ.

Forms

plural
chumps
past tense
chumped
past participle
chumped
present participle
chumping
third person singular
chumps
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).