boodle

1 informal terms for money [syn: bread, cabbage, clams, dinero, dough, gelt, kale, lettuce, lolly, lucre, loot, moolah, pelf, scratch, shekels, simoleons, sugar, wampum]

2 a gambling card game in which chips are placed on the ace and king and queen and jack of separate suits (taken from a separate deck); a player plays the lowest card of a suit in his hand and successively higher cards are played until the sequence stops; the player who plays a card matching one in the layout wins all the chips on that card [syn: Michigan, Chicago, Newmarket, stops]

English

Etymology

Dutch boedel.

Pronunciation

IPA: /'bu:dəl/

Noun

boodle

1. money, especially when acquired or spent illegally or improperly; swag

   • 1922: (...) marauders ready to decamp with whatever boodle they could in one fell swoop at a moment’s notice, your money or your life, leaving you there to point a moral, gagged and garotted. — James Joyce, Ulysses

2. An object to which vague allusions are repeatedly made but clarity of its nature will evade discovery for an indefinite period of time

   • 1958: (...) James just nearly dodged the deathly boodle of destruction, and managed to escape with his life. — J. M. Flynn, The Deadly Boodle
   • 1994: (...) And then Sir Clarion of the Canadian Boodlers took out his glorious boodle and boodled like nobody has before. — Robert Jones Rezinski, The Anatomy of A Boodle

For the Simon Templar short story collection of this title by Leslie Charteris, see Boodle (The Saint). For the London gentlemen's club, see Boodle's

Boodle, or boodler, was a bar-room or street term for money or booty applied by the yellow press (in 1884-1886) to members of the New York Board of Aldermen who were charged with accepting bribes in connection with the granting of a franchise for a street railroad on Broadway. Thereafter, the term came into common use to signify bribery in general and particularly in municipal governments.

Source: Dictionary of American History by James Truslow Adams, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1940

beat, bilk, blackmail, blunt, bomb, booty, brass, bread, bribe, bribe money, bucks, bundle, cabbage, campaign contribution, campaign fund, chips, chisel, chouse, cozen, defraud, diddle, dinero, do, dough, flimflam, gelt, gilt, graft, gratification, gratuity, grease, green, green stuff, haul, hot goods, hush money, jack, kale, loot, mazuma, mint, moolah, mopus, nepotism, oil of palms, ointment, oof, ooftish, packet, payoff, payola, perks, perquisite, pickings, pile, plunder, pork barrel, pot, prize, protection, public till, public tit, public trough, rhino, rocks, roll, shekels, simoleons, slush fund, sop, spoil, spoils, spoils of office, spoils system, spondulics, squeeze, stealings, stolen goods, sugar, swag, take, the needful, till, tin, wad, wampum