spivvery

English

Alternative forms

• spivery

Etymology

spiv +‎ -ery

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ˈspɪvəɹi/

• Audio (Southern England)

  (file)

Noun

spivvery (countable and uncountable, plural spivveries)

1. Behaviour characteristic of a spiv; crookery, petty crime.
   • 1948 July 4, “Mr Bevan's bitter attack on Tories”, in The Guardian‎^[1], →ISSN:

     The Government decided the issues in accordance with the best principles, he said: "The weak first; and the strong next." Mr. Churchill preferred a free-for-all, but what was Toryism except organised Spivvery?

   • 1956, Kenneth Wolstenholme, Sports Special, page 39:

     Rome is also a city of spivvery, a city which had a black market before black markets were invented.

   • 2013, Edward Page, A 1950s Childhood, Amberley, →ISBN, page 70:

     With fascism defeated and Great Britain back on form, it is an optimistic start, but in spite of Mr Attlee’s government promising all the best things for Britain, the country has descended into spivvery, which forces the good men of 1087 [a motor gun boat; see The Ship That Died of Shame] into trafficking drugs and becoming criminals.

   • 2015 November 28, Martin Vander Weyer, “Never too late to investigate HBOS”, in The Spectator, page 36:

     Slater Walker became synonymous, after the 1973 crash, with City spivvery and the kind of risk-taking excess from which the next generation failed to learn.

   • 2018 April 23, Aditya Chakrabortty, “Some call it outsourcing. I call it spivvery”, in The Guardian‎^[2], →ISSN:

     This is spivvery for which you and I pay billions extra just to get minimal services—it can also lead to a financial fragility at the heart of the firms on which Britain now relies.

Further reading

• Eric Partridge (2005) “spivvery”, in Tom Dalzell and Terry Victor, editors, The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, volumes 2 (J–Z), London, New York, N.Y.: Routledge, →ISBN, page 1837.