{{Short description|Elizabethan slang for theft through trickery}} {{Wiktionary|cony-catching}} '''''Coney-catching''''' is Elizabethan slang for theft through trickery. It comes from the word "coney" (sometimes spelled ''conny''), meaning a rabbit raised for the table and thus tame.<ref>{{cite book|title=Shakespeare: The World as Stage|last=Bryson|first=Bill|authorlink=Bill Bryson|year=2007|publisher=HarperCollins|isbn=978-0-06-074022-1|oclc=136782567}}</ref>
A coney-catcher was a thief or con man.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/history/crime%20and%20the%20law/coney-catching.html;jsessionid=C8C564E298896F480646F6D8C1AEBC4B|title=Coney-catching|date=4 January 2011|accessdate=22 March 2013|publisher=University of Victoria|work=Internet Shakespeare Editions|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130508123402/http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/history/crime%20and%20the%20law/coney-catching.html|archive-date=8 May 2013|url-status=dead}}</ref>
It was a practice in medieval and Renaissance England in which devious people on the street would try to con or cheat vulnerable or gullible pedestrians. The term appears in ''The Taming of the Shrew'' and ''The Merry Wives of Windsor'' by William Shakespeare, and in the John Florio translation of Montaigne's essay, "Of the Cannibals."
The term was first used in print by Robert Greene in a series of 1592 pamphlets,<ref>{{cite book|title=The Cambridge History of English and American Literature|chapter=Robert Greene's Social Pamphlets|year=1907–1921|publisher=Bartleby.com (online edition) / Cambridge University Press (original)|editor1-last=Ward|editor1-first=Adolphus William |editor2-last=Waller|editor2-first=Alfred Rayney|editor3-last=Trent|editor3-first=William Peterfield|editor4-last=Erskine|editor4-first=John|editor5-last=Sherman|editor5-first=Stuart Pratt|editor6-last=Van Doren|editor6-first=Carl|isbn=1-58734-073-9|chapter-url=http://www.bartleby.com/214/1604.html|accessdate=22 March 2013}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.exclassics.com/cony/conyintro.htm|title = THE COMPLETE CONY-CATCHING BY ROBERT GREENE - Introduction}}</ref> the titles of which included "The Defence of Conny-catching," in which he argued there were worse crimes to be found among "reputable" people, and "A Disputation betweene a Hee Conny-catcher and a Shee Conny-catcher."
==References== {{Reflist}}
Category:English-language slang Category:Archaic English words and phrases Category:Crimes
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