toady [E19th] In the 17th century unscrupulous charlatans and quacks would try to sell their supposed remedies by demonstrating their powers. One technique was to have an assistant take the quack medicine and then eat, or pretend to eat, a toad [OE]—people thought that toads were poisonous and so were likely to attribute the assistant’s survival to the charlatan’s wares. Such an assistant was a toad-eater [E17th]. In the mid 18th century the word also came to mean ‘a fawning flatterer’, and in the early 19th this was shortened to toady. See also mushroom, tadpole.