the.com/shylock
a loan shark named after a fictional moneylender, which is exactly as unfair as it sounds.
means a predatory lender who charges extortionate interest, often with menacing collection tactics; from the character in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice.
from shylock is the moneylender in Shakespeare's 1596 play, demanding a pound of flesh as collateral; by the early 1900s americans had turned his name into a verb and noun for loan sharks, stripping away the play's context and leaving a slur-adjacent stereotype behind.
antisemitic baggagethe term traffics in a centuries-old jewish moneylender stereotype
legal usage bannedsome us officials have been formally reprimanded for saying it
shakespeare's ironythe play itself critiques the bigotry the slur now embodies
mob slang crossover1900s gangster vocabulary absorbed it for loan enforcers