How many letters is the answer to "swindle"?

Anything from 3 to 11. The length with the most candidates is 5. Count the squares in your grid and read only that row of the table.

How reliable are these answers?

15 of the 25 appear in two independently compiled reference works, WordNet and Moby Thesaurus, rather than one. All of them are in the 173,000-word dictionary this site searches. None of them comes from any published puzzle.

Crossword clue

Swindle crossword clue

25 words in our dictionary can answer the crossword clue "swindle", from as short as 3 letters up to 11, grouped below by the length of your slot.

Written by Blake Boege

Answers by length

Everything below fits the clue. What separates them is length, running from 3 letters to 11, so find your row and ignore the rest.

Letters	Answers
3	conconfirmed by two sources rig gip gypconfirmed by two sources
4	rookconfirmed by two sources scamconfirmed by two sources
5	buncoconfirmed by two sources cheatconfirmed by two sources mulctconfirmed by two sources bunko short stingconfirmed by two sources
6	diddleconfirmed by two sources nobble hustle
7	defraudconfirmed by two sources holdout
8	cozenageconfirmed by two sources flimflamconfirmed by two sources
9	goldbrick victimizeconfirmed by two sources
10	pyramiding thimblerigconfirmed by two sources
11	hornswoggle shortchangeconfirmed by two sources

What this list looks like

6 of these are 5 letters, which is more than any other length manages.

Setters reach for 3-letter answers constantly, and here that means CON, RIG, GIP, GYP.

11 of the 25 are not synonyms at all but specific kinds of what the clue describes.

Which one does the setter mean?

Three squares is CON, which is short for confidence trick and is the answer here far more often than anything else. GYP also fits three and is worth knowing, though its origin makes it a word many editors now avoid.

How these differ

The short ones are the crimes: CON, SCAM and STING are all specific kinds of planned deception, the STING being the moment the money changes hands. ROOK and MULCT mean to overcharge rather than to invent a scheme. CHEAT is the general word and the only one that also covers exams and card games. FLIMFLAM, HORNSWOGGLE and THIMBLERIG are American nineteenth-century and deliberately comic, the last one a shell game played with a thimble. SHORTCHANGE is the smallest swindle here and the only one most people have suffered.

Still stuck? Filter by the letters you have

Got a crossing letter? The word finder searches the same dictionary as this page, with a box for the first letter, the last, and anything in between.

Where these answers come from

These came out of a dictionary. Every word above is recorded by WordNet as meaning “swindle” or as naming a kind of it, and each one is in the 173,000-wordlist this site searches. Moby Thesaurus lists 15 of them too. We hold no newspaper's answer key and reproduce no published crossword.

Common questions

What is the answer to the crossword clue "swindle"?: There is more than one. 25 words in our dictionary fit this clue, and which one a puzzle wants depends on the length of the slot and the crossing letters. Three squares is CON, which is short for confidence trick and is the answer here far more often than anything else. GYP also fits three and is worth knowing, though its origin makes it a word many editors now avoid.
How many letters is the answer to "swindle"?: Anything from 3 to 11. The length with the most candidates is 5. Count the squares in your grid and read only that row of the table.
How reliable are these answers?: 15 of the 25 appear in two independently compiled reference works, WordNet and Moby Thesaurus, rather than one. All of them are in the 173,000-word dictionary this site searches. None of them comes from any published puzzle.