/ˈkɒn ˌɑːrtɪst/
[noun] A person who tricks other people into giving them money or doing something by gaining their trust first. A con artist uses clever lies and a friendly manner to steal from people or get what they want.
The word 'con' has nothing to do with being against something — it is short for 'confidence', meaning con artists literally sell you trust.
The story of 'con artist' begins with a real person — or at least a real type of person — who appeared on the streets of New York City in the 1840s. A man named Samuel Thompson became famous for approaching well-dressed strangers, chatting with them warmly, and then asking whether they had enough 'confidence' in him to lend him their watch or a small sum of money. He would take the item and simply walk away. The New York press called him 'The Confidence Man', and the label stuck to his trade. The full phrase 'confidence man' entered American newspapers around 1849, and the word 'confidence' was quickly shortened in everyday speech to 'con'.
The word 'confidence' itself has a long and respectable history. It comes from the Latin confidentia, meaning 'trust' or 'full belief', which was built from the verb confidere — com- (meaning 'with' or 'completely') combined with fidere (meaning 'to trust'). This Latin root fidere also gave English the words 'fidelity', 'fiduciary', and even 'faith' through the Old French word foi, tracing back to Latin fides. In its original sense, confidence simply meant the honest feeling of trusting someone. The con artist's genius was to weaponise exactly that noble quality.
The word 'artist' in the phrase is used in an older, broader American slang sense that was popular throughout the 19th century. At that time, Americans used 'artist' to mean someone who was highly skilled at something — not just painting or music, but any craft or technique. You could read in newspapers about a 'trapeze artist', a 'makeup artist', or even a 'bunco artist' (a card cheat). Calling a swindler an 'artist' was darkly admiring — it acknowledged that fooling people well took real skill and practice. The combination 'con artist' is first recorded in American English around the 1890s, though 'confidence man' and the shorter 'con man' were already widely used by then.
The phrase gained enormous cultural power in part because of literature. Herman Melville published a novel in 1857 simply called The Confidence-Man, set on a Mississippi riverboat, which explored the idea that all of American commercial life was a kind of confidence game. The book asked an unsettling question: if business, religion, and politics all depend on people trusting one another, how different is a respectable banker from a con artist? This theme — that con artistry lives uncomfortably close to legitimate persuasion — has never really gone away.
Over the 20th century, 'con artist' travelled beyond American borders and became standard English worldwide, carried along by Hollywood films and popular fiction. The phrase produced a rich family of related terms: a 'con' can now be used as a noun (the scam itself), a verb ('he conned me'), or an adjective ('a con job'). The underlying idea, though, has not changed since Samuel Thompson's day — it is always about manufacturing trust, about making someone feel safe precisely so that safety can be taken from them. The word is a small, sharp reminder that the most dangerous lies are the ones wrapped in the warmest smiles.