Charlatan

 WORD OF THE DAY

charlatan / noun / SHAHR-luh-tun

Definition
1: quack
2a: one making usually showy pretenses to knowledge or ability
2b: fraud, faker

Examples
“A particular gripe of mine is when bogus scientific results, sometimes fraudulent, sometimes just sloppy, manage to sneak into the peer-reviewed scientific literature. This happens all too often, especially as the number of papers published each year has grown. These bad papers are then used by fraudsters and charlatans (and sometimes by innocent people who just don’t have the expertise to understand) to ‘prove’ an unscientific claim.”
— Steven Salzberg, Forbes, 25 July 2022

Meanwhile, her family contends with their charlatan of a relative, the new Lord Featherington (Rupert Young), who seeks to con the ton out of their wealth.
—Maureen Lee Lenker, EW.com, 25 Mar. 2022

Did You Know?
In medieval Italy, people roamed throughout the land selling fake remedies and making false claims about their healing abilities.
Many of these pretenders reputedly came from a village called Cerreto, and as a result, cerretano (meaning “inhabitant of Cerreto”) became an epithet for a quack physician.
In addition, these frauds used a practiced patter to attract customers, like the chatter of a circus barker.
The Italian word for “to chatter” is ciarlare, and chattering was so associated with the cerretano that the spelling of the word shifted to ciarlatano.
By the early 17th century, English speakers had anglicized the Italian word to charlatan and adopted it as their own.