See snake oil on Wiktionary
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"(idiomatic) A fraudulent, ineffective potion or nostrum; panacea."
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"word": "aceite serpentino"
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"ref": "2022 January 12, Nigel Harris, “Comment: Unhappy start to 2022”, in RAIL, number 948, page 3:",
"text": "As for the IRP, Secretary of State Grant Shapps continues to peddle snake oil, smoke and mirrors. His reaction to near-universal IRP condemnation from politicians, local and national media, and all but a few rail specialists was to dismiss the lot of us (in the condescending and patronising tone we have now come to expect) as \"critics and naysayers\".",
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"word": "kvaksalverprodukt"
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{
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"sense": "fraudulent, ineffective potion or nostrum",
"word": "huijauslääke"
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"sense": "fraudulent, ineffective potion or nostrum",
"tags": [
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],
"word": "poudre de perlimpinpin"
},
{
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"lang": "German",
"lang_code": "de",
"sense": "fraudulent, ineffective potion or nostrum",
"tags": [
"neuter"
],
"word": "Quacksalberprodukt"
},
{
"code": "pl",
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"sense": "fraudulent, ineffective potion or nostrum",
"tags": [
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"masculine"
],
"word": "olej z węża"
},
{
"code": "pt",
"lang": "Portuguese",
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"sense": "fraudulent, ineffective potion or nostrum",
"tags": [
"masculine"
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"word": "pó de perlimpimpim"
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{
"code": "fi",
"lang": "Finnish",
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"sense": "traditional Chinese medicine",
"word": "käärmeöljy"
},
{
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"sense": "traditional Chinese medicine",
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"lang": "Spanish",
"lang_code": "es",
"sense": "traditional Chinese medicine",
"tags": [
"masculine"
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"word": "aceite serpentino"
}
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"word": "snake oil"
}
Download raw JSONL data for snake oil meaning in All languages combined (4.3kB)
This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable All languages combined dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2026-09-06 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2026-09-02 using wiktextract (ccec6f1 and 4deed51). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.
If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.