dicker

English

From Middle English diker (“measure of ten”), from Late Latin dacra (“a dicker”), from Latin decuria (“a ten of something”), from decem (“ten”).

dicker (third-person singular simple present dickers, present participle dickering, simple past and past participle dickered)

(intransitive) To bargain, haggle or negotiate over a sale.
- 1913, Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Return of Tarzan, New York: Ballantyne Books, published 1963, page 57:
  At Bouira the detachment detrained, and the balance of the journey was made in the saddle. As Tarzan was dickering at Bouira for a mount he caught a brief glimpse of a man in European clothes eying him from the doorway of a native coffeehouse
- 1941, Emily Carr, chapter 6, in Klee Wyck‎:
  In the brilliant sparkle of the morning when everything that was not superlatively blue was superlatively green, I dickered with a man who was taking a party up the inlet that he should drop me off at the village I was headed for.
(intransitive) To barter.
- 1848, James Fenimore Cooper, chapter 2, in The Oak Openings‎:
  Then, the white men who penetrated to those semi-wilds were always ready to "dicker" and to "swap," and to "trade" rifles, and watches, and whatever else they might happen to possess, almost to their wives and children.
(intransitive) To fiddle.
- 1981, Jack Cady, Singleton:
  They sat in a booth near the door and drank the first cold ones of the evening while watching three impassioned pinballers dickering with flashing, promising, tilting machines.

dicker (countable and uncountable, plural dickers)

(obsolete) A unit of measure, consisting of 10 of some object, particularly hides and skins.
- 1599, attributed to Thomas Heywood, Edward IV, Part One, Act III, Scene 1,
  Hobs . My taking is more than my spending, for here's store left. I have spent but a groat; a penny for my two jades, a penny to the poor, a penny pot of ale, and a penny cake for my man and me, a dicker of cowhides cost me.
- 1866, James Edwin Thorold Rogers, A History of Agriculture and Prices in England, volume 1, page 171:
  The dicker, or daker, was ten, and is found, though generally at later times than the period before us, as a measure for hides and gloves.
(US) A chaffering, barter, or exchange, of small wares.
to make a dicker
- 1856, John Greenleaf Whittier, The Panorama‎:
  “Grant that the North’s insulted, scorned, betrayed,
  O'erreached in bargains with her neighbor made,
  When selfish thrift and party held the scales
  For peddling dicker, not for honest sales,—
  Whom shall we strike? Who most deserves our blame?