Finagle meaning

fə-nā'gəl
To use clever or deceitful means to obtain or achieve something.
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To obtain or achieve by cleverness or deceit, especially in persuading someone.

Finagle a day off from work; finagled a reservation at the popular restaurant.

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To cheat; swindle.

Shady stockbrokers who finagle their clients out of fortunes.

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To get, arrange, or maneuver by cleverness, persuasion, etc., or esp. by craftiness, trickery, etc.
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To use craftiness, trickery, etc.
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To obtain, arrange, or achieve by indirect and usually deceitful methods.

...finagle a day off from work.

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(intransitive) To cheat or swindle; to use crafty, deceitful methods. (often with "out of" preceding the object)

...shady stockbrokers who finagle their clients out of fortunes.

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Origin of finagle

  • Probably from dialectal fainaigue to cheat
    From American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition
  • Americanism from the 1920s, perhaps combining an alteration of fainaigue (“to renege”) with the suffix +‎ -le (“frequentive”); compare haggle.
    From Wiktionary

Finagle Sentence Examples

  • After a series of phone calls to Denver and some monstrous lies, Dean managed to finagle a slot on the bike tour, not an easy accomplishment given the short time before the popular event.

  • Cats seem to possess an inborn ability to finagle their way out of harmful situations, and one of the manifestations of this ability is the act of landing on all four feet after a fall.

  • A free reading is hard to come by, but if you have services that you can offer in trade, you may be able to finagle a reading without exchanging any cash.

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Words near finagle in the Dictionary