The term dicker (meaning “petty arguing”) is on the decline. According to Google NGrams, literary uses of it today are only at half the level they were in the 1960s. Interestingly, the main source of Google searches for this term is the name of a furniture store in Lansing, Michigan called Dicker and Deal. The term was borrowed in the thirteenth century, likely via West Germanic, with early spellings including dacre, deker, dyker, dikker, and more. It originated from Late Latin dacra, which also meant “petty arguing”. This Latin word came from decuria, meaning “parcel of ten”, as it was used as a unit of barter in the Roman empire bordering Germania. This barter system typically involved bundles of hides or rods that were often exchanged in groups of ten. The root of decuria is decem, the Latin word for “ten”, which is also the etymon for words like December, decimal, and decile. This root is reconstructed to the Proto-Indo-European root dekm.
