the.com/con
The first three letters of confidence, convince, and con artist — coincidence is doing a lot of work.
means A swindle in which someone wins your trust only to betray it — short for 'confidence,' as in the confidence trick.
from From 'confidence man,' a term for swindlers who first earn a mark's trust before fleecing them — recorded in 19th-century America. 'Con' got clipped off as slang shorthand and went on to spawn 'con artist,' 'con job,' and the verb 'to con' someone. The overlap with the 'con' in 'confidence' and 'convince' isn't etymological kinship — it's the same Latin root (com- + fidere, 'to trust') surfacing in both the honest word and the word for abusing it.
- short for
- confidence trick, not convict (that is prison slang confusion)
- linguistic root
- con man predates convict as common usage
- opposite
- pro, as in pros and cons, unrelated etymology
- modern use
- also shorthand for fan conventions, zero overlap intended