haggle
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English
[edit]Etymology
[edit]1570s, "to cut unevenly" (implied in haggler), frequentative of Middle English haggen (“to chop”), variant of hacken (“to hack”), equivalent to hack + -le. Sense of "argue about price" first recorded c.1600, probably from notion of chopping away.[1]
Pronunciation
[edit]Verb
[edit]haggle (third-person singular simple present haggles, present participle haggling, simple past and past participle haggled)
- (intransitive) To argue for a better deal, especially over prices with a seller.
- 2020, Abi Daré, The Girl With The Louding Voice, Sceptre, page 184:
- ‘I am pretty useless at haggling. Haggling means asking the seller to sell stuff below the asking price.’
- I haggled for a better price because the original price was too high.
- (transitive) To hack (cut crudely)
- 1599 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Life of Henry the Fift”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act IV, scene vi]:
- Suffolk first died, and York, all haggled o'er, / Comes to him, where in gore he lay insteeped.
- 1884 December 10, Mark Twain [pseudonym; Samuel Langhorne Clemens], The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: (Tom Sawyer’s Comrade) […], London: Chatto & Windus, […], →OCLC:
- I catched a catfish and haggled him open with my saw, and towards sundown I started my camp fire and had supper. Then I set out a line to catch some fish for breakfast.
- To stick at small matters; to chaffer; to higgle.
- June 30, 1784, Horace Walpole, letter to the Hon. Henry Seymour Conway
- Royalty and science never haggled about the value of blood.
- June 30, 1784, Horace Walpole, letter to the Hon. Henry Seymour Conway
Synonyms
[edit]- (to argue for a better deal): wrangle
Derived terms
[edit]Translations
[edit]to argue for a better deal
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to stick at small matters
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See also
[edit]References
[edit]- ^ Douglas Harper (2001–2024) “haggle”, in Online Etymology Dictionary.
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