- 1
To dicker is to talk back and forth about the details of a sale or an agreement — the price, the extras, who pays for what — until both sides can live with it. It sits close to , though dicker can feel a little more like patient, talking, not only shouting a lower number. It is mainly American, and it sounds a bit old-fashioned; many people would just say bargain, , or negotiate. You can also have a dicker over the fee. Under the word sits an old measure of ten: a dicker of hides was ten skins, from Latin decem, “ten.” The bargaining meaning probably grew from traders arguing over those lots.
講價、討價還價
組成From Middle English diker, a measure of ten, from Late Latin dacra, from Latin decuria (a ten of something), from decem (ten). The “argue over a deal” meaning probably grew from trading in lots of ten, especially hides.
原始詞典資料5 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
dickerverb/ˈdɪkə(ɹ)/
- 1
To bargain, haggle or negotiate over a sale.
- At Bouira the detachment detrained, and the balance of the journey was made in the saddle. As Tarzan was dickering at Bouira for a mount he caught a brief glimpse of a man in European clothes eying him from the doorway of a native coffeehouse, […]
- In the brilliant sparkle of the morning when everything that was not superlatively blue was superlatively green, I dickered with a man who was taking a party up the inlet that he should drop me off at the village I was headed for.
- 2
To barter.
- Then, the white men who penetrated to those semi-wilds were always ready to "dicker" and to "swap," and to "trade" rifles, and watches, and whatever else they might happen to possess, almost to their wives and children.
- 3
To fiddle.
- They sat in a booth near the door and drank the first cold ones of the evening while watching three impassioned pinballers dickering with flashing, promising, tilting machines.
dickernoun/ˈdɪkə(ɹ)/
- 1
obsoleteA unit of measure, consisting of 10 of some object, particularly hides and skins.
- 1599, attributed to Thomas Heywood, Edward IV, Part One, Act III, Scene 1, https://books.google.ca/books?id=d_MuAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false Hobs [the Tanner of Tamsworth]. […] My taking is more than my spending, for here's store left. I have spent but a groat; a penny for my two jades, a penny to the poor, a penny pot of ale, and a penny cake for my man and me, a dicker of cowhides cost me.
- The dicker, or daker, was ten, and is found, though generally at later times than the period before us, as a measure for hides and gloves.
- 2
A chaffering, barter, or exchange, of small wares.
- to make a dicker
- “Grant that the North’s insulted, scorned, betrayed, O'erreached in bargains with her neighbor made, When selfish thrift and party held the scales For peddling dicker, not for honest sales,— Whom shall we strike? Who most deserves our blame?
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。