patsy.
A person who is easily manipulated, victimized, or made to take the blame for something.
Meaning & usage
A person who is easily manipulated, victimized, or made to take the blame for something.
A conspirator, secretly designated by co-conspirators to take full blame and punishment for a wrongdoing, particularly an assassination; a fall guy.
Where this word comes from
The term dates back at least to the 1870s in the United States, close to the peak of Irish migration. The OED's recent revisions link Patsy with Pat and Paddy, the stereotype of the bogtrotter just off the boat. The American Heritage Dictionary and Online Etymology Dictionary quotes the OED it may derive from the Italian pazzo (“madman”), and souther Italian dialect paccio (“fool”). Another possibility is the term derives from Patsy Bolivar, a character in an 1880s minstrel skit who was blamed whenever anything went wrong, in Broadway musical comedies, for example in The Errand Boy [1904] and Patsy in Politics [1907].
To treat (a person) as a patsy or sucker; to pin the blame on.
To mess around; to waste time.
Where this word comes from
The term dates back at least to the 1870s in the United States, close to the peak of Irish migration. The OED's recent revisions link Patsy with Pat and Paddy, the stereotype of the bogtrotter just off the boat. The American Heritage Dictionary and Online Etymology Dictionary quotes the OED it may derive from the Italian pazzo (“madman”), and souther Italian dialect paccio (“fool”). Another possibility is the term derives from Patsy Bolivar, a character in an 1880s minstrel skit who was blamed whenever anything went wrong, in Broadway musical comedies, for example in The Errand Boy [1904] and Patsy in Politics [1907].
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.