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welsh

verbadjectiveattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//wɛlʃ//

To cheat or swindle someone, often by not paying a debt, especially a gambling debt.

verb

  1. 1

    To cheat or swindle someone, often by not paying a debt, especially a gambling debt.

  2. 2

    To go back on one's word.

    "He can weasel out if^([sic]) it." Ibanez massaged her knuckles. "He can say Couch welshed on a deal, and didn't show, and that's why Karen got got. It isn't conclusive. I have another thing I can lay on him, but even the two combined won't do. We need a third smoking gun if we're really gonna smoke this son of a bitch."

Etymology

Sometimes held to derive from disparaging stereotypes about the Welsh, though firm evidence of this derivation is lacking. Compare gyp (“swindle”), probably from Gypsy, and jew (“defraud”), from Jew.

adjective

  1. 1

    obsoleteForeign.

Etymology

Inherited from Old English welise (“foreign”).

Forms

comparative
more welsh
superlative
most welsh
past tense
welshed
past participle
welshed
present participle
welshing
third person singular
welshes
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).