---
title: "What’s In A Word: Grift"
date: "2026-11-11T14:27:07+00:00"
modified: "2026-11-11T14:27:08+00:00"
url: "https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/whats-in-a-word-grift/"
post_id: 11096
---

# What’s In A Word: Grift

![](https://newhumanist.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/11/2F2CMWX-1-1200x800.jpg)Anna Sorokin, aka the “Soho Grifter”, who faked being a Russian-German heiress. Credit: Sipa US/Alamy Live News**Grift***, c. 1915: To obtain money or property illicitly (as in a confidence game)*

What words or phrases have appeared in your lifetime, that you’re sure you didn’t know as a child, or even just years ago? For someone older than 60 or 70, here are some suggestions: shoo-in, shill, gaslight, “drink the Kool-Aid”, dead cat, clickbait, deepfake, sealioning and virtue-signalling.

Eagle-eyed readers will spot that one of these terms actually derives from a play written in 1938, with a film version in 1944. In *Gas Light*, a husband drives his wife to madness by dimming the lights and denying it. The story inspired its current use to describe psychological and emotional abuse, where a person manipulates someone to make them question their own memories, perceptions or sanity. Eruptions of what seem like modern words may sometimes be based on earlier usages.

Coinages and adaptations often arrive in British English from our cousins, the Americans. And so it is with “grifting” and “grifters”, an accusation that has been increasingly thrown about in recent years. Name a politician and the slightest rumour of, say, a tax fiddle, and cue loud denunciations that “grifters will grift”. This magazine can’t afford libel cases so I won’t repeat any of these.

As with “gaslighting”, the verb “grifting” has been around for a while. In his seminal hardboiled detective novel *The Big Sleep*, published in 1939, Raymond Chandler uses “grift” and “grifter” to describe a cynical world where nearly everyone is on the make. When detective Philip Marlowe confronts the small-time criminal Joe Brody, Brody tells Marlowe: “Got a grift, brother – or just amusing yourself?” A few pages later, Brody uses “grifter” during the same standoff: “She’s a grifter, shamus. I’m a grifter. We’re all grifters. So we sell each other out for a nickel.”

The dictionaries are hesitant on the evolution of “grift”. They think it probably derives from “graft”. Of course, “graft” has its innocent meanings to do with hard work, and with plants and trees and medicine. But the relevant “graft” in relation to “grift” is the one that means obtaining advantage by dodgy means. The first example of this use, according to the *Oxford English Dictionary*, is 1865 in the *US National Police Gazette*, quoting a criminal talking about their accomplice: “Twas handy that we were so related as, when about a ‘graft’ …both sisters could keep each other company.”

The origins of “graft” are not certain either, though the OED suggests that English speakers adopted the Old French word *greffier*, meaning a clerk of the court, itself derived from the word for stylus or pen. The first use of its later sense appears in English in 1483, and by 1554 one Sir John Wulfe was described as a “maker and deviser of the Kinges herbors and plantes of grafts”.

The first switch from “graft” to “grift” and “grifters” in written sources seems to be in or around 1915 in a novel called *God’s Man* by George Bronson-Howard, some of which is written in US underworld slang.

So, we have an interesting timeline, stretching from Old French, to English references to grafts for plants (1483), to grafting for underhand purposes (1865), to grifting (1915), which was then popularised by Raymond Chandler in 1939.

But the puzzle remains: why has the word become so pervasive recently? Is there really more grifting about these days, or are we just more aware of it? I wonder what Raymond would think.