Plural of charlatan: people who pretend to have special knowledge or skills that they don't actually possess in order to trick others.
From Italian 'ciarlatano,' possibly from 'ciarlare' (to chatter) or from 'Ceretano,' a man from Cereta. The word entered English in the 16th century to describe traveling con artists and fraudulent doctors.
In medieval and Renaissance Europe, 'charlatans' would travel from town to town selling fake miracle cures—and the word became so iconic that it's almost the same in every European language, showing how universal the problem of fraud was!
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