Trickery comes from trick (from Old North French trique, from trikier 'to deceive, cheat', of uncertain origin) + the suffix -ery. The historical chain includes Old French trikier. The quoted older sense, "to deceive, cheat," supplies the immediate semantic anchor for trickery. The formation is best read as suffixal, compound, and borrowed: the word trickery carries its older form-history into a compact English lexical shape. In present English it is used as a noun, "the practice of deceiving or cheating by cunning means". Related English forms include trick, trickster, tricky, and trickish. The result is a noun whose etymology preserves both the older form and the later English specialization.