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Glite Dictionary
to turn a trick

to turn a trick

11 9.9
To have sex with a customer for money
  • idiom
  • NSFW
translation icon : prostituirse
  • Years ago, in LA, I turned a trick on Sunset and Western.
  • Prostitutes turn tricks
  • started turning tricks
  • turned tricks on the streets

Examples

  • The father of the boys, a Marine, was serving in Iraq, and his mother became a heroin junkie. To support her habit, she turned tricks in the apartment.

    Blog text (32)

  • Raul visits a dealer to buy medicine for his AIDS-stricken mother, a gaunt former beauty still turning tricks to support herself.

    Blog text (3)

  • Hey, you wanna turn a trick?

    Joe (1970)

  • Maybe she went there to turn a trick but found she had a chance to better herself.

    Fiction book (1990)

  • The only way she could support Norman would be if she started turning tricks again.

    Fiction book (1996)

  • The women are forced to turn a trick to earn money for their survival.

  • She decided to turn a trick after running out of cash for food.

  • He warned her that turning a trick could lead to dangerous situations.

Synonyms

to sell one's body
vsto turn a trick
  • NSFW
9.9

To have sex with someone for money

is the informal idiom for the same action

Surface Forms

turn a trick infinitive
turned a trick past
turned a trick past participle
turning a trick present participle
turns a trick third person singular

Morphology

turn + a + trick

The sense of the noun 'trick' here is slang (a client or single act of prostitution) and 'turn' must be read as 'perform/serve', so if a learner already knows these specific senses they could compositionally infer 'to have sex with a customer'. However, those senses are specialized/slang and not the basic meanings B1 learners typically know, so the phrase is not fully predictable from ordinary word knowledge.

Etymology

The phrase turn a trick probably comes from the idea of a short turn, a small performance for a paying customer, and trick was the word for that quick visit. So it came to mean 'to have sex with a customer for money'.