| The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000. |
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| sucker |
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| SYLLABICATION: | suck·er |
| PRONUNCIATION: |  s k  r |
| NOUN: | 1. One that sucks, especially an unweaned domestic animal. 2. Informal a. One who is easily deceived; a dupe. b. One that is indiscriminately attracted to something specified: “The nation's capital is a sucker for a symbolic gesture” (Jonathan Alter). 3. Slang a. An unspecified thing. Used as a generalized term of reference, often as an intensive: “our goal of getting that sucker on the air before old age took the both of us” (Linda Ellerbee). b. A person. Used as a generalized term of reference, often as an intensive: He's a mean sucker. 4. A lollipop. 5a. A piston or piston valve, as in a suction pump or syringe. b. A tube or pipe, such as a siphon, through which something is sucked. 6. Any of numerous chiefly North American freshwater fishes of the family Catostomidae, having a toothless jaw and a thick-lipped mouth adapted for feeding by suction. 7. Zoology An organ or other structure adapted for sucking nourishment or for clinging to objects by suction. 8. Botany A secondary shoot produced from the base or roots of a woody plant that gives rise to a new plant. | | VERB: | Inflected forms: suck·ered, suck·er·ing, suck·ers
| | TRANSITIVE VERB: | 1. To strip suckers or shoots from (plants). 2. Informal To trick; dupe: sucker a tourist into a confidence game. | | INTRANSITIVE VERB: | Botany To send out suckers or shoots.
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| The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by the Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
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