levee

Pronounced: LEV-ee

Notes: I only knew one of the definitions, and one was surprising

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Yesterday’s word

The word thimblerig means “to cheat by trickery”

First usage

Our word came into English in the early 1800s

Background / Comments

I suspect most of us have heard of “the shell game” — in which a seed is placed under a nutshell and an unsuspecting player is asked to bet on where the seed is. Well, our word is the same game, but played with thimbles instead of nutshells. There is a similar game played with cards that is called “three-card monte”. We still use the -rig part of the word in the sense of deception or dishonesty when we say, for example, “that game is rigged”. Thus, from the name of the game came the more generalized usage that we see in our word. As I noted yesterday, I have a recollection of running across the word somewhere, but I don’t remember where. There was a Nero Wolfe story (Some Buried Caesar by Rex Stout) in which Archie Goodwin (Nero’s assistant) was thrown in jail with a guy who tried to get Archie involved in the shell game, but I don’t recall our word being used there.