“Gazump”

My friend Michael Regan, a Bloomberg journalist, sent me a link to a Bloomberg article

Mike commented: “Gazump: Fun new Britishism making the rounds on Wall Street.” I didn’t know from “gazump” so immediately looked it up. The OED‘s main definition is “swindle” and its first cite is from the Daily Express in 1928: “‘Gazoomphing the sarker’ is a method of parting a rich man from his money. An article is auctioned over and over again, and the money bid each time is added to it.” (Note that both this and the Bloomberg quote have quotation marks around the word, indicating recent coinage.)

The definition goes on to note a more specific meaning: “to act improperly in the sale of houses, etc,” which apparently originated around 1971, the date of a Guardian article with this sentence (and again note the quotation marks), “‘Gazumping’—a system of profiteering by double selling and pushing prices up—is creeping into the property market… The word is car trade slang for selling to one buyer and then, as values rise, to a second buyer.”

The OED, perhaps not wishing to offend, lists the etymology as “Unknown,” but Green’s Dictionary of Slang persuasively suggests it comes from “Yid. gezumph, to cheat or to overcharge.” Green’s also has citations for the “swindle” meaning dating from 1928 (all from U.K. or Australian sources), but offers a fuller definition of the real estate sense: “to accept a stated price for one’s property and then to raise that price, using as a threat a supposed, but usu. non-existent, ‘offer’ from elsewhere; alternatively, the seller accepts one price and then, tempted by a genuinely greater offer, dumps the first buyer without sorrow or ceremony.”

As for Not One-Off Britishism status, the word is recent, specialized and still infrequent. The News on the Web (NOW) corpus, which tracks about 25 billion words from web-based newspapers and magazines from 2010-2025, officially lists 56 U.S. uses of “gazump” in that time (compared to 209 in a data base of half the size in the United Kingdom). But that way overstates it, as 40 of the 56 are in reference to one incident from 2022 (described below) and fifteen of the rest are actually from British or commonwealth sources and/or are about British or international football. The remaining cite is from a Salon.com article about animated films, which noted, “DreamWorks had already dipped its toes into the digital waters with its CG debut ‘Antz’ in 1998. A film about an underground ant colony, it seemed to gazump rival feature ‘A Bug’s Life,’ which would appear in cinemas only a month.” But the piece originally appeared in the Australian journal The Conversation, and the author, Christopher Holliday, is identified as a “Lecturer in Film Studies, Department of Liberal Arts, King’s College London.”

The 2022 kerfuffle related to a columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald supposedly outing actress Rebel Wilson’s romantic relationship. NBCNews.com noted:

“In the original article, published on Saturday, Herald gossip columnist Andrew Hornery wrote that he had emailed Wilson’s representatives two days before publication seeking comment on her relationship with designer Ramona Agruma.

“Hornery wrote that Wilson instead ‘opted to gazump the story’ by announcing the news on her Instagram profile on Friday, a decision he characterized as a ‘big mistake’ and ‘underwhelming.’ (Gazump is a British-Australian slang term for swindle or outbid.)”

But there are a few legit U.S. examples, in addition to the Bloomberg quote. A 2004 New York Times article explains the English term and quotes a New York real-estate executive as saying, “”There are a million stories of people getting the gazump.” The same year, the Times used it in a more general sense of getting unexpectedly and suddenly outbid: “The team of Manhattan media big shots lost the bidding [for New York magazine] when they were gazumped by the Wall Street dealmaker Bruce Wasserstein.”

A 2020 article broadens the use to mean, more or less, “contradicted”: “The decorator who advises you can always enhance modest furnishings with blankets and throw pillows is gazumped one page later by a decorator who says don’t blow your budget on pillows and blankets.”

Kind of amazingly, the 50 or 60 most recent uses in the Times database are from its Athletic wing and are about British or European football, where it appears to have become a massive cliché. Most recently, from a March 19 article about the business end of football: “operating deficits have actually worsened, as increased income continues to be gazumped by higher wages and operating costs.”

But I have faith in Mike Regan’s ears, and I expect “gazump” to spread from Wall Street to Main Street in due course.