A swindler or con artist who tricks people out of their money through deception, especially in 16th-century slang.
From cony 'rabbit' (the victim) plus catcher, from the 1500s when rabbits were commonly trapped and hunted. This term metaphorically compared defrauded victims to helpless rabbits caught by hunters, reflecting how criminals exploited people.
Conycatcher is one of history's greatest slang terms—it reveals how 16th-century London criminals saw their victims as passive prey, and Shakespeare himself used variations of this term in plays, showing how pervasive fraud was in Elizabethan street life.
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