shyster [M19th] An American story goes that there was once an unscrupulous lawyer called Scheuster who gave his name to the shyster, but no record of him has ever been found. It is more likely that German Scheisser ‘worthless person’ formed from Scheisse ‘excrement’, is the word’s origin, since it first appeared in New York, home to many German-speaking immigrants, as a term for an unqualified lawyer who preyed on inmates of the notorious prison called the Tombs. Shyster soon took on the sense of an unscrupulous lawyer rather than a fake one.