Huckster

 WORD OF THE DAY

huckster / noun / HUCK-ster

Definition
1a: hawker, peddler
1b: one who sells or advertises something in an aggressive, dishonest, or annoying way
2: one who produces promotional material for commercial clients especially for radio or television
3a: haggle
4: to deal in or bargain over
5: to promote aggressively 

Examples
By this light, the president’s deification is not the strange mania of easy marks, keen to be hoodwinked by a trashy gratifying huckster.
— Ian Beacock, The New Republic, 6 Dec. 2021

To the people who doubted him, Williams was a huckster.
— K. Austin Collins, Rolling Stone, 19 Nov. 2021

Did You Know?
Hawkers, peddlers, and hucksters have been selling things out of the back of wagons, in narrow alleys, and on the fringes of towns for years (though nowadays, they're more likely to plug their wares on television or the Internet).
Of those three words-"hawker," "peddler," or "huckster"-the one that has been around the longest in English is "huckster."
It has been with us for over 800 years, and it derives from the Middle Dutch word hokester, which in turn comes from the verb hoeken, meaning "to peddle."
"Peddler" (or "pedlar") was first attested in the 14th century, and this sense of "hawker" has only been appearing in English texts since the early 1500s.