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fraud

nounverbcommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈfɹɔːd//
  • United Kingdom/[ˈfɹʷɔːd]/
  • Australia//ˈfɹoːd//
  • Australia/[ˈfɹʷoːd]/

The crime of stealing or otherwise illegally obtaining money by use of deception tactics.

noun

  1. 1

    The crime of stealing or otherwise illegally obtaining money by use of deception tactics.

  2. 2

    Any act of deception carried out for the purpose of unfair, undeserved or unlawful gain.

    When success a lover's toil attends, / Few ask, if fraud or force attain'd his ends.

    But electric vehicles and the batteries that made them run became ensnared in corporate scandals, fraud, and monopolistic corruption that shook the confidence of the nation and inspired automotive upstarts.

  3. 3

    The assumption of a false identity to such deceptive end.

  4. 4

    A person who performs any such trick.

  5. 5

    obsoleteA trap or snare.

    to draw the proud King Ahab into fraud

Etymology

Inherited from Middle English fraude (recorded since 1345), from Old French fraude, a borrowing from Latin fraus (“deceit, injury, offence”).

verb

  1. 1

    obsoleteTo defraud.

Forms

plural
frauds
past tense
frauded
past participle
frauded
present participle
frauding
third person singular
frauds
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).