foist
Other forms: foisted; foisting; foists
Did your parents foist your baby sister on you when they went out? It means they forced her on you. Anything — a person or object or idea — can be foisted if it's done by force upon an unwilling party.
Foist used to imply a degree of deception rather than just brute forcebut that's a meaning that's pretty much lost now: if something's foisted upon youyou know about it. The earlier meaning comes from an old Dutch term for palming a loaded die into a game. Today we call that cheating.
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Vocabulary lists containing foist
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In the Nobel Prize-winner's first novela young black girl yearns to conform to society's rigid standards of beauty.
Originally published as "On the Duty of Disobedience" and based on an 1848 lectureThoreau's work is a civil libertarian classic. Questioning the authority of all governmentsThoreau especially challenges both the right of the state to tax him and the morality of a government that allows slavery. Read the full text here.