To cheat, swindle, or defraud someone; an archaic term for dishonest deception.
Variant spelling of chouse; emerged in 17th-century English with uncertain ultimate origin, possibly Turkish or Romany. The spelling varied widely in period documents.
Chowse appears in Ben Jonson's comedies as a recognized term for sophisticated con games, showing that by the early 1600s it had entered literary language as a description of urban fraud.
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