sharping

Updated: May 8, 2025

All wandering minstrels, sharping peddlers, sturdy trulls, and other camp trumpery were ordered to pack up their baggage, and were drummed out of the gates of Alhama. In place of such lewd rabble he introduced a train of holy friars to inspirit his people by exhortation and prayer and choral chanting, and to spur them on to fight the good fight of faith.

Washington Irving - Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada

The prodigious mystery in all their proceedings gave them the appearance of the heads of a party, and I never had the least doubt of their being the authors of the 'Gazette Ecclesiastique'. The one, tall, smooth-tongued, and sharping, was named Ferrand; the other, short, squat, a sneerer, and punctilious, was a M. Minard. They called each other cousin.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau - The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau — Volume 10

As we went back to our ships I spied behind I don't know what bush, I don't know what folks, doing I don't know what business, in I don't know what posture, scouring I don't know what tools, in I don't know what manner, and I don't know what place. How Pantagruel arrived at the island of Sharping.

François Rabelais - Gargantua and Pantagruel, Illustrated, Book 5

'Oh, but Tommy, the fortune? Lord Almeric protested seriously. 'I vow you are sharping us. 'True too, my lord, as I hope to be saved! 'True? Oh, but it is too monstrous absurd, my lord wailed. 'The Little Masterson? As pretty a little tit as was to be found in all Oxford. The Little Masterson a fortune? 'She has eyes and a shape, Mr. Pomeroy admitted generously.

Stanley John Weyman - The Castle Inn

Miss Williams found me, next morning, full of anxious tumult, which did not abate when she told me that my Lord Quiverwit, having professed honourable intentions, had been introduced to my lovely mistress by her brother, who had, at the same time, from the information of Melinda, spoken of me as an Irish fortune-hunter, without either birth or estate; who supported myself in the appearance of a gentleman by sharping and other infamous practices; and who was of such an obscure origin, that I did not even know my own extraction.

T. (Tobias) Smollett - The Adventures of Roderick Random

Nothing demoralizes a people so much as these continual fluctuations which make every man a broker, and hold out to the working classes a means of getting money by sharping, instead of by their labour.

Madame de (Anne-Louise-Germaine) Staël - Ten Years' Exile: Memoirs of That Interesting Period of the Life of the Baroness De Stael-Holstein, Written by Herself, during the Years 1810, 1811, 1812, and 1813, and Now First Published from the Original Manuscript, by Her Son.