Chumping

Part of speech: verb, present participle

Definitions

1. To deceive someone into believing something false
2. to bamboozle or trick someone cleverly
3. to act foolishly or naively, often in relation to being misled or duped

Etymology: The verb "chump" is itself an inflected-looking form only in part: "chumping" is simply the present participle of "chump", so its history is the history of that verb. The source treats the origin of "chump" as uncertain. It may be a blend of "chunk" and "lump" or "stump", or perhaps a nasalised form of "chub", a word for something thick or chubby. Some scholars also point to Old Norse "kubbr", a block of wood, which hints at a sense of solid, heavy bulk. The verb's other route is more traceable. It is a variant of "chomp", which itself is a variant of "champ", meaning "to bite". So the original idea was of chewing or biting noisily, and the leap to a fool is the surprising part: someone easily taken in is, figuratively, someone who can be chewed up and swallowed. Just as "chump" in its noun form came to mean a dupe, the participle "chumping" describes the act of being fooled.

Synonyms: chewing, munching, chomping, biting, gnawing