humbug

Meanings

Noun

• A hoax, jest, or prank.
• A fraud or sham; hypocrisy.
• A cheat, fraudster, or hypocrite.
• Nonsense.
• A type of hard sweet (candy), usually peppermint flavoured with a striped pattern.
• Anything complicated, offensive, troublesome, unpleasant or worrying; a misunderstanding, especially if trivial.
• A fight.
• A gang.
• A false arrest on trumped-up charges.
• The piglet of the wild boar.

Interjection

• Balderdash!, nonsense!, rubbish!

Verb

• To play a trick on someone, to cheat, to swindle, to deceive.
• To fight; to act tough.
• To waste time talking.

Origin

• Origin unknown; the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) states that “the facts as to its origin appear to have been lost, even before the word became common enough to excite attention”. It has been suggested that the word possibly derives from hummer, or from hum + bug. In his Slang Dictionary (1872), English bibliophile and publisher John Camden Hotten (1832–1873) suggested a link to the name of the German city of Hamburg, “from which town so many false bulletins and reports came during the war in the last century”.
• Hotten also said he had traced the earliest occurrence of the word to the title page of Ferdinando Killigrew’s book The Universal Jester (see quotations), which he dated to about 1735–1740. This dating has therefore been adopted by other dictionaries. However, the OED dates the word to about 1750, as the earliest edition of Killigrew’s work has been dated to 1754.