Trickster comes from trick (from Old North French trique, from trikier 'to deceive, cheat') + the agentive suffix -ster. The historical chain includes Old French trikier. The quoted older sense, "to deceive, cheat," supplies the immediate semantic anchor for trickster. The formation is best read as suffixal, compound, and borrowed: the word trickster carries its older form-history into a compact English lexical shape. In present English it is used as a noun, "a person who deceives or plays tricks on others". Related English forms include trick, trickery, and tricky. The result is a noun whose etymology preserves both the older form and the later English specialization.