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Skulduggery is secret dishonest behaviour — cheating, tricks, maybe something illegal, done behind people’s backs. Newspapers like it for dirty and shady business. Though actually, people also use it with a smile, for small mischievous plotting that is not really a crime: whispering in the kitchen before a surprise party can be “a bit of skulduggery.” It is a colourful, slightly old-fashioned word, more at home in a story or a headline than in a police report (which would say fraud or misconduct). You will see two spellings: skulduggery and skullduggery, with two l’s. The double-l spelling is more American, in the same style as . It looks a little like skull, but a link to skulls is guesswork, and probably just a story people tell.
見不得人的手段、搞鬼（報紙可用「詭計、不當手段」；有時是開玩笑）
組成An alteration of Scots sculduddery / sculdudrie, which meant adultery, unchaste behaviour, or lewdness. The older history is uncertain; it was probably a softer cover-word. A link to skull is speculative and likely folk etymology. The American spelling skullduggery follows words like skillful.
原始詞典資料2 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。
skulduggerynoun/skʌlˈdʌɡəɹi/
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A devious device or trick.
- A private company cannot get away with a skulduggery of that sort. Once it has paid out its money for taxes, it cannot reach into the public treasury and get it back and apply it on its amortization account.
- And you, O student, might do worse than to investigate the assorted sculduggeries of this obscure trio: […]
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Dishonest, underhanded, or unscrupulous activities or behaviour.
- And I have another reason which I will express to my St Paul friends, and that is, that they have always been controlled in their political action here by a class of men who have always some traps set for the country members—by men who are always up to this border ruffian kind of trickery—this kind of skullduggery, as it is called in Minnesota. And now St. Paul allows herself to be controlled by these same border ruffian politicians.
- How did Hercules (Herc. of antiquity) slay the Hydrant and cleanse the stables of Oregon? Did it all by main force, didn't he? Power? Shenanigan? Skulduggery? Of course he did.
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。