лох (lokh)

What it means

1. 1.

   A sucker; a mark; someone who can be taken for a ride and does not see it coming. The insult is about being naive and socially weak rather than unintelligent.

2. 2.

   A defining word of the 1990s, when the entire country was being defrauded and nobody wanted to be the one who fell for it. Still current, still stinging.

Examples with translations

• Ты что, за лоха меня держишь?

  What, do you take me for an idiot?

• Развели как лоха.

  They played me for a complete mug.

Where it comes from

From the argot of itinerant traders, where лох was a peasant who could be cheated; there is also a northern dialect word лох for a spent salmon, easy to catch. Both feed the same image, and the camp argot picked it up from there.

Other forms

Romanised as:

lokh