faitour means A charlatan or imposter, especially one pretending to be ill, or to tell fortunes. Lexicurio rates it Sui generis — a strength score of 87 out of 100.
faitour is pronounced /ˈfeɪtə/.
Why “faitour” is a great word
A deceitful vagrant who simulates illness or claims prophetic insight to elicit alms. From Middle English faitour, from Anglo-Norman faitour (impostor), from Old French faitor (doer, maker), from Latin factor, factōrem (maker, doer), from facere (to do, to make). First attested in English c. 1300–50. Unlike a 'charlatan,' who cloaks empty expertise in medicine or science, or a 'mountebank,' whose flamboyant quackery is a public performance, the faitour’s craft is a quieter, more pathetic theatre of fraud. He is the man by the roadside with a strategically bandaged limb, the sour-milk scent of a bandage wrapped over healthy skin, the practiced rattle of a breath in a shadowed doorway—a figure whose entire existence is a carefully maintained counterfeit, a maker of his own desperate fiction.
Etymology
From Middle English faitour, from Anglo-Norman faitour (cognate with Old French faitor (“doer, maker”), from Latin factor, factōrem, from facere (“do, make”).
noun
- A charlatan or imposter, especially one pretending to be ill, or to tell fortunes.“Allas sayd kynge Lot I am ashamed / for by my defaute ther is many a worshipful man slayne / for and we had ben to gyders there hadde ben none hooste vnder the heuen that had ben abel for to haue matched with vs / This fayter with his prophecye hath mocked me”