History of the word dicker
Executive summary
The English word dicker traces a long route from Latin decem (“ten”) through medieval measures for trade into a modern verb meaning “to haggle”; scholars link the noun denoting a bundle of ten (especially hides) to a later American verb sense that arose in the late 18th or early 19th century [1] [2] [3]. Sources agree on the core lineage—Latin decuria → Middle English dyker/diker → modern dicker—but differ on exactly how and where the bargaining sense consolidated, and dictionaries flag some uncertainty about whether the verb directly derived from the medieval noun [4] [5] [6].
1. Etymological root: decem and the Roman decuria
The oldest firm anchor is Latin: decem “ten” gave rise to decuria, a Latin term for a group or parcel of ten, which medieval Latin and Old French forms recorded as dacra/dikeria and fed into English as dyker/diker [2] [6] [4]. Major dictionary entries explicitly trace the noun dicker to this lineage and cite the semantic field of “ten” and “parcel” as the plausible origin [1] [4].
2. The medieval noun: a “dicker” as a set of ten hides
By the Middle Ages English had a noun meaning a unit of ten—commonly ten hides or similar packaged goods—attested in forms like dyker or diker; examples and lexica record this commercial counting-unit from as early as the 13th–14th centuries [2] [6] [7]. Reference works and historical glosses list citations of “dicker” as a measure—“a dicker of hides”—showing the word’s practical use in premodern trade [7] [4].
3. The verb emerges: American English and bargaining
The transformation into the verb sense “to haggle, bargain” is a later development and is primarily recorded in American English from the late 1700s into the early 1800s; the OED and etymological dictionaries cite late‑18th to early‑19th‑century attestations for the verb form and quote sources mentioning “dickering” in commercial contexts [5] [3] [8]. Etymologists commonly propose that this verb sense grew from trading over “dickers” (the bundles of ten hides), a natural jump from the object traded to the activity surrounding its exchange [1] [3].
4. Attestations and documentary evidence
Major lexica differ slightly in the earliest documentary evidence: the OED records verb uses from the late 1700s and cites specific early writers, while other dictionaries date the noun’s attestations to the 13th–14th centuries and place the verb solidly in the early 1800s American corpus [8] [6] [2]. Popular etymology sites and usage guides repeat the same lineage—Decuria → diker → dicker—while also noting the earliest literary and newspaper appearances that helped solidify the modern sense [9] [10].
5. Scholarly caveats and competing readings
Despite broad agreement about descent from Latin, authorities flag uncertainty about mechanics: some etymologists endorse a straightforward noun→verb derivation tied to hide‑trading on frontiers, whereas others caution that the evidence is circumstantial and that verb use may have arisen by analogy or through dialect contact rather than direct semantic drift [1] [11] [5]. Secondary online writers note the word’s shrinking frequency and speculate about cultural or regional causes, but those observations rest on corpus trends rather than firm etymological proof [12].
6. Modern sense and decline
Contemporary dictionaries define dicker as “to haggle” and record idiomatic uses in journalism and fiction, yet corpus and n‑gram data cited by commentators show the word’s literary frequency has declined since mid‑20th century peaks; dictionary entries continue to cite examples of modern usage while acknowledging its chiefly American registration [6] [12] [8]. In short, the etymological story is coherent—Latin “ten” → medieval counting‑unit → American bargaining verb—but scholars acknowledge gaps in documentary proof about the precise pathway from package to pejorative bargaining verb [2] [5].