Pronounced: shluh-MEEL, noun
Notes: I’ve never read this word, but I’ve heard it
Yesterday’s word
The word tinhorn means, as a noun, “someone who pretends to have money, skill, influence, etc”. As an adjective, it means “inferior or insignificant, while pretending to be otherwise”.
First usage
Our word came into English in the late 1800s
Background / Comments
As I noted yesterday, I’ve heard the word used as an adjective, but the noun meaning was quite unknown to me. Our word comes from the world of gambling, in which a cone-shaped container was used to shake the dice. A “tinhorn” gambler was someone who pretended to be a big player, but actually played for small stakes.
Richard's Vocabulary Word-of-the-Day 