Knavery

/ˈneɪvəri/

noun

dishonest or unprincipled behavior

The word 'knavery' comes from the Middle English term 'knavern,' which means 'to deceive.' It is often used to describe cunning or deceitful actions, typically associated with dishonesty or trickery.

Monks, still bearing that assumed name, retired with his portion to a distant part of the New World; where, having quickly squandered it, he once more fell into his old courses, and, after undergoing a long confinement for some fresh act of fraud and knavery, at length sunk under an attack of his old disorder, and died in prison.

Charles Dickens

Oliver Twist

“Precisely,” said Schliemann; “the low knavery and the ferocious cruelty incidental to them, the plotting and the lying and the bribing, the blustering and bragging, the screaming egotism, the hurrying and worrying.

Upton Sinclair

The Jungle

I think I actually did meet monsieur personally, several years ago, at the house of Madame la Princesse Bagration and in the drawing-rooms of his Lordship the Vicomte Dambray, peer of France.” It is always a good bit of tactics in knavery to pretend to recognize someone whom one does not know.

Victor Hugo

Les Misérables

Is it something to eat, glutton and gormandiser that thou art?” “It is not something to eat,” replied Sancho, “but something to govern and rule, and better than four cities or four judgeships at court.” “For all that,” said the housekeeper, “you don’t enter here, you bag of mischief and sack of knavery; go govern your house and dig your seed-patch, and give over looking for islands or shylands.”450 The curate and the barber listened with great amusement to the words of the three; but Don Quixote, uneasy lest Sancho should blab and blurt out a whole heap of mischievous stupidities, and touch upon points that might not be altogether to his credit, called to him and made the other two hold their tongues and let him come in.

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Don Quixote

The knavery and extravagance of their stock-jobbing projects are sufficiently known, and the explication of them would be foreign to the present subject.

Adam Smith

The Wealth of Nations