mulct

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The Word of the Day for November 21 is:=20

mulct   \MULKT\   verb
         1 : to punish by a fine
    2 *a : to defraud especially of money : swindle  b : to obtain by fr=
aud, duress, or theft=20

Example sentence:
     Francis was finally barred from the securities industry when it was=
 discovered he'd been mulcting investors for years.

Did you know?
     A fine assessed as a penalty for an infraction is generally conside=
red justifiable. Fraud, on the other hand, is wrong -- it's just the sor=
t of thing that deserves a fine. So in "mulct" we have a unique word, on=
e that means both "to fine" and "to defraud." The "fine" sense came firs=
t. "Mulct" was borrowed from the Latin word for a fine, which is "multa"=
 or "mulcta." The =E2=80=9Cfine=E2=80=9D sense is still in use, mostly i=
n legal contexts ("the court mulcted the defendant for punitive damages"=
), but these days "mulct" is more often used for an illegal act. It has =
been speculated that the use may have come about by association with the=
 verb "milk," in its sense "to exploit, to coerce profit from" (as in "s=
he was milked by the lawyers for everything she had"), but that speculat=
ion has never been proven.





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