Free translatorFree translator
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Fives   Listen
noun
Fives  n. pl.  A kind of play with a ball against a wall, resembling tennis; so named because three fives, or fifteen, are counted to the game.
Fives court, a place for playing fives.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Fives" Quotes from Famous Books



... ivy (or poison oak) which is very poisonous to some people, and more or less so to all people. The poison ivy has a leaf similar to the harmless woodbine, but the leaves are grouped in threes instead of fives. The poison given off by these plants produces a severe inflammation of the skin. In the early stages it may be spread from one part of the body to ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts

... Lynmouth. That's really admirable, now, isn't it? Just consider the advantages of the situation. A doubtful parent comes to inspect the arrangements; sniffs at the dormitories, takes the gauge of the studies, snorts over the playground, condescends to approve of the fives courts. Then, after doing the usual Christian principles business and working in the high moral tone a little, we invite him to lunch, and young Le Breton to meet him. You remark casually in the most unconscious and natural fashion—I admit, my dear, that you do these little ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen

... gathered into beautiful family groups, each sapling exquisitely symmetrical. The primary branches are whorled regularly around the axis, generally in fives, while each is draped with long, feathery sprays, that descend in curves as free and as finely drawn as ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir

... head; a very small 'tip' had a forefinger to the peak; while he who gave nothing at all got a good stare or a good morning! or something of that sort. A man watching the arrival of the field could see who gave the fives, who the fours, who the threes, who the twos, who the ones, and ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees

... breakfast at the coffee-house, where he happened to meet with his friend the clergyman and several persons of genteel appearance, to whom the doctor introduced him as a new messmate. By these gentlemen he was conducted to a place where they spent the forenoon in playing at fives, an exercise in which our hero took singular delight; and about one o'clock a court was held, for the trial of two delinquents, who had transgressed the laws of honesty and good order. The first who appeared at the bar was an attorney, accused of having picked ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett

... "Fives" is a game which is a test also of one's store of information. A letter is chosen, say T, and for a given time, ten minutes perhaps, the players write down as many names of animals beginning with T as they can think of. ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher

... He conducted his hermit shop here for twenty years. Say he was twenty-five when he took off his hat at the gate. That leaves twenty years for him to account for, or else be docked. Where did he spend that ten and two fives? I'll give you my idea. Up for bigamy. Say there was the fat blonde in Saint Jo, and the panatela brunette at Skillet Ridge, and the gold tooth down in the Kaw valley. Redruth gets his cases mixed, and they send him up the road. He gets out after they are through with him, and says: 'Any line for ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry

... fives. Evan was, for a moment, doubtful of the existence of the denomination asked for, but he reasoned that Castle would not give him the thirty dollars and look so serious if it were only a joke. He went around among the banks on a wild-goose-chase for the second time that day. A sympathizing ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen

... of threes and fives were formed over the floor of the lodge; others less fortunate were closely packed together around the outer edge of the lodge and could procure their food only through the generosity of their neighbors. The girl ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various

... better humor? While these thoughts were passing through my brain, I mechanically took up the execrable puzzle and tried every imaginable way of grouping the letters. I put them together by twos, by threes, fours, and fives—in vain. Nothing intelligible came out, except that the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth made ice in English; the eighty-fourth, eighty-fifth, and eighty-sixth, the word sir; then at last I seemed to find the Latin words rota, mutabile, ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne

... twos which you see, but my shots have turned them into threes, fives, sevens, eights, nines, and tens." Albert approached. In fact, the bullets had actually pierced the cards in the exact places which the painted signs would otherwise have occupied, the lines and distances being as regularly kept as if they had been ruled with pencil. ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... altered so materially as to be hardly recognisable. Others, on the contrary, such as "tin tin," ice, "oottoot," wood, "weengay," no, "ay," yes, and most of the numerals up to ten, have undergone no change whatever. Both Koraks and Chukchis count by fives instead of tens, a peculiarity which is also noticeable in the language of the Co-Yukons in Alaska. The Korak ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan

... is now in the possession of a family of Mohammedans, one of the very few Moslem families still living in the valley of Tali. "When we were in possession of the valley," said the father sorrowfully, "we numbered '12,000 tens' (120,000 souls), now we are '100 fives' (500 souls). Our men were slain, our women were taken in prey, only a remnant escaped the destroyer." Several members of the family were in the court when we entered, and among the men were three with marked Anglo-Saxon features, a peculiarity frequently seen in Western ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison

... objective source | | to a combined and simultaneous perception of them. | | | | [9] Patterson, p. xx, n. 3. | | | | [10] Experiments have shown that with a little practice one | | can learn to beat five against seven, and thus actually | | though unconsciously count in thirty-fives. (Patterson, p. | | 6.) ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum

... old man smiled, and Gwyn renewed his vow, the new wife began to count by fives—one, two, ...
— Welsh Fairy Tales • William Elliot Griffis

... and the adjoining provinces, in such a manner that not only every considerable town was furnished with a detachment, but most of the large villages were occupied; and in every part of the country small parties of threes, fours, and fives, were so stationed; at the distance of one, two, and three leagues from each other; that they could easily perform their daily patroles from one station to another in the course of the day, without ever being obliged to stop at a ...
— ESSAYS, Political, Economical and Philosophical. Volume 1. • Benjamin Rumford

... room. Nobody was there, either, so he broke his sealed shell boxes, filled his case with sixes and fives and double B's, drew his expensive ducking gun from its case and took a look at it, buckled the straps of his hip boots to his belt, felt in the various pockets of his shooting coat to see whether matches, pipe, tobacco, vaseline, oil, shell extractor, knife, handkerchief, gloves, were ...
— Blue-Bird Weather • Robert W. Chambers

... with leather and a hole in it. Then 13, 15, and 17 repeat the previous marks of 3, 5, and 7. Two knots indicate 20, three knots 30, four knots 40 fathoms, and so on, with an additional knot for every ten. Meanwhile a single knot indicates the intermediate fives. Besides this system some pilots prefer their own marks, as in the Hooghly, where they always measure the line for themselves. The term "deep-sea line" must not now be confined to the use of the lead for the ordinary purposes of safe navigation; deep-sea soundings for scientific purposes ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth

... not want, under any conditions, to become reconciled, in teaching her arithmetic, to her queer, barbarous, savage, or, more correctly, childish, primitive method of counting. She counted exclusively in ones, twos, threes and fives. Thus, for example, twelve to her was two times two threes; nineteen—three fives and two twos; and, it must be said, that through her system she with the rapidity of a counting board operated almost up to a ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin

... thirteen means three-ten, and that the children can touch the three and the ten as they speak the word. Eleven and twelve ought to be called oneteen and twoteen, half in joke. The idea of grouping should never be lost sight of, and larger numbers should at first be names for so many threes, fours, fives, etc. In order to keep the meaning clear the children should say threety, fourty and fivety, but there should be no need to write these numbers. The Kindergarten sticks tied in bundles of ten are quite convenient ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith

... a man of the world, and will know how to manipulate the gentleman, whoever he may be. And now lock your bag and cut downstairs as fast as you can. Time's up. Here's your money—three tens, two fives. Good day." ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon

... places," said Martin; "I could do it better if you'd give me some smaller bills. They don't like to change fives and tens." ...
— Rufus and Rose - The Fortunes of Rough and Ready • Horatio Alger, Jr

... don't want to educate children so that they may understand. Understanding is a fallacy and a vice in most people. I don't even want my child to know, much less to understand. I don't want my child to know that five fives are twenty-five, any more than I want my child to wear my hat or my boots. I don't want my child to know. If he wants five fives let him count them on his fingers. As for his little mind, give it a rest, and let his dynamic self be alert. He will ask "why" often enough. But he more often ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence

... put, for at every cross-road or railway bridge a warm sentry-box of mud and straw and plaited pine-branches was plastered against a bank or tucked like a swallow's nest into a sheltered corner. A little farther on we began to come more and more frequently on big colonies of "Seventy-fives." Drawn up nose to nose, usually against a curtain of woodland, in a field at some distance from the road, and always attended by a cumbrous drove of motor-vans, they looked like giant gazelles feeding among elephants; and the stables of woven pine-boughs which stood near by might ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton

... cricket and footer," said Jellicoe impressively. "He's in the shooting eight. He's won the mile and half two years running. He would have boxed at Aldershot last term, only he sprained his wrist. And he plays fives jolly well!" ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse

... evidently enjoyed his new dignity of patron and mentor, proposed having a look at the close, which Tom, athirst for knowledge, gladly assented to; and they went out through the quadrangle and past the big fives court, ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes

... incomplete, and leaves the appearance of confusion and negligence. The common exercises of the Welsh are running, leaping, swimming, wrestling, throwing the bar, dancing, hunting, fishing, and playing at fives against the church or tower; and they constitute the joy of youth, and the admiration of old age. The convivial amusements are singing and versification. In these favourite exercises the performers are ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 274, Saturday, September 22, 1827 • Various

... for his father had been generous. At the sight of the money a greedy look came into the eyes of Mr. Baker, a look that would have warned Roy had he seen it. But he was busy looking for a one-dollar bill among the fives ...
— The Boy from the Ranch - Or Roy Bradner's City Experiences • Frank V. Webster

... that I'll run twenty-five hundred pounds to the ton, pure lead. Well, we can put up a pretty nifty fight, even so. You go back to the other outlet of your cave and I'll stay here. I'm kinder lonesome, too.... Toss me some cartridges first. I only got five. I left in a hurry. You got forty-fives?" ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes

... good couple would be better likened to two principals in a sparring match, who, when fortune is low and backers scarce, will chivalrously set to, for the mere pleasure of the buffeting; and in one respect indeed this comparison would hold good; for, as the adventurous pair of the Fives' Court will afterwards send round a hat, and trust to the bounty of the lookers-on for the means of regaling themselves, so Mr Godfrey Nickleby and HIS partner, the honeymoon being over, looked out wistfully into the world, relying in no inconsiderable degree ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens

... fives, then. It's the only chance we have; and if you think, as I do, that it is essentially necessary for the welfare of the country that we should remain where we are, we must run ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope

... you, Ellis, you could do whatever you tried, just as well as other fellows," said Ernest, as he sat by him at tea. "Now I must show you how to play cricket, and hockey, and football, and fives, and all sorts of games. To-morrow we'll have a little quiet practice at cricket with single wicket, and I'll wager by the summer that you'll be able to play in a match with ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston

... their place in the world's work. It gives one pause, and the desire to look into the future—and dream. Ten years hence, twenty, fifty, one hundred! What can the dreamer and the prophet foretell? When those whom we now count by fives and tens are multiplied by the hundred, what will it mean for the future of India and the world? What of the gladness of America through whose hand, outstretched to share, there has come the release of these ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren

... Leonora has assured me, only three times in the year that succeeded her coming home from the convent did she enter another person's house. For the rest of the time the seven sisters ran about in the neglected gardens between the unpruned espaliers. Or they played lawn-tennis or fives in an angle of a great wall that surrounded the garden—an angle from which the fruit trees had long died away. They painted in water-colour; they embroidered; they copied verses into albums. Once a ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford

... stood within fifteen miles of Paris, and then upon Paris had turned its back. They knew also that the reverberations from the direction of Meaux, that each moment grew more loud and savage, were the French "seventy-fives" whipping the gray column forward. Of what they felt the Germans did not speak. In silence they looked at each other, and in the eyes of ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis

... the corner. But at the same time it was no kind of an answer to my question, and I kicked the musical implement high in the air, sitting down on my shoulder blades to watch it go, and also to acknowledge receipt of one bunch of fives in the right eye, kindness of Grandma in the short skirts. Beware of appearances! Nothin' takes so much from the fierce appearance of a man as short skirts and sock-knitting, but up to this date the hand of man hasn't pasted me such a welt ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips

... of the florist shop and backed out. The woman in charge there looked just too elegant to approach. At the hardware store he was told that he could have two fives for a ten if that would help him. It wouldn't, so Jerry still had ...
— Jerry's Charge Account • Hazel Hutchins Wilson

... new head master. Yet it was not at the school-house that he and I were to stay, but at the house that we had both been in as boys. It also had changed hands: a wing had been added, and the double tier of tiny studies made brilliant with electric light. But the quad and the fives-courts did not look a day older; the ivy was no thicker round the study windows; and in one boy's castle we found the traditional print of Charing Cross Bridge which had knocked about our studies ever since a son of the contractor ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung

... heavier would my head be than Jack's?' A man that had got his heart in learning figures would make sums for himself and work 'em in his head. When he sat at his shoemaking, he'd count his stitches by fives, and then put a price on his stitches, say half a farthing, and then see how much money he could get in an hour; and then ask himself how much money he'd get in a day at that rate; and then how much ten workmen would get working three, ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot

... intricacy in the web; this fourth orange, hitherto unremarked, but still kept flying with the others. What had seemed to be one thing it now appears is two; and, like some puzzle in arithmetic, the verse is made at the same time to read in fives and to read ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... sort of game. We turn away from the water, and follow some who are mounting a steep path. Here is the racquet-court—four are playing racquets and four playing fives. ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various

... the town, a teazer; [2] A spicy blade for wedge or sneezer; [3] Could turn his fives to anything [4] Nap a reader, or filch a ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer

... philosophising is concerned, but of which he is a master. "On the Indian Jugglers" is a capital example of what may be called improving a text; and it contains some of the most interesting and genial examples of Hazlitt's honest delight in games such as rackets and fives, a delight which (heaven help his critics) was frequently regarded at the time as "low." "On Paradox and Commonplace" is less remarkable for its contribution to the discussion of the subject, than as exhibiting one of Hazlitt's most curious critical megrims—his dislike of Shelley. I wish ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury

... was stout; only he was brave; only he had a song on his lips. He coaxed us, and cheered us, and rallied us. The strength of the regiment was but his strength, and as for the other party, who hung on our flank, or lagged behind us or preceded us by half a day, their Kurds deserted by fives and tens until there was scarcely a ...
— Hira Singh - When India came to fight in Flanders • Talbot Mundy

... out on the table, Mrs. Lively standing by watching him, for once speechless. "It's just the amount we lost, and the same bills. See here: ten five-hundred-dollar bills, and this change that we lost in Chicago; and four ten-dollar bills and four fives that were lost here. They are the same bills. Who ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various

... arm to shield himself as he said in a low voice, 'Look out, Lopes; don't shout so! we don't want all the kids to know about this matter;' for just at this moment a trio of merry lads came round the corner of the Fives Court, whooping and shouting at the top of their voices. 'Come to the garden; we shall be quiet there, and can talk over matters, and see what can be done;' and Barton closed the book he had been studying and led the ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various

... call intense bombardment. When it is very rapid—like the swift roll of a kettledrum—you take it that it must be the French seventy-fives down South preparing the way for a French assault. But it is often our own guns after all—I doubt if there are many who can really distinguish between the distant ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean

... hands?" said the Observer, holding up two "bunches of fives," whose digits were stained near the ends with some dark brown substance, "that's pyrogallic acid—and that burn near my thumb was made by Blitz Pulver. It wouldn't take a Sherlock Holmes to discover that I had the ...
— Said the Observer • Louis J. Stellman

... Verdun told tragic tales of the fighting. "I watched the assault of the Germans upon the village of Milancourt, near the Meuse," said a wounded Frenchman. "They came in solid ranks, without a word, loading and reloading their rifles without cessation. Our seventy-fives fell among them, and then the mitrailleuses entered into action. It was no longer a battalion. It was a few scattered groups of men that one saw, torn by a rain of shells and bullets, squeezing close against each other ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell

... years of age," said Orthodocia gravely, with a reproachful glance at me, "and I weigh ten stone. Height, five feet eight inches. In shoes, I am in the habit of wearing fives; in gloves, six ...
— Humour of the North • Lawrence J. Burpee

... one excellent reason," he interrupted; "yet there are several more moving than that. Your father, Lord Stair, and mine were out together in the forty-fives, on which side I need scarcely mention; and again, your grandfather and mine both loved and fought for the beautiful Nancy Hamilton, and, but for the preference of the lady herself, she might have been my own grandmother. These things call for a friendly feeling between ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane

... or fives years ago I read in a magazine a portion of two interplanetary stories by Ray Cummings. Now to the point, I wonder if it is possible for you to obtain Mr. Cummings' permission to have your company publish these two ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various

... almost no activity on that part of the front. A couple of times a day a few snapping discharges would come from the seventy-fives of the battery behind the Abbey, and the woods would resound like a shaken harp as the shells passed over to explode on the crest of the hill that blocked the end of the valley ...
— One Man's Initiation—1917 • John Dos Passos

... didn't know which was the best shot—likely! And every tin can in sight shot full of holes and testifyin' against you! Think I'm blind, hey? Even your horses give you away. Never batted an eyelash durin' that whole cannonade. They've been hearin' forty-fives pretty ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes

... said, "I won't say I'm sorry, because I'd tell a big lie if I did, and I'll worry him just as much as I please. But I'll tell 'e what I'll do. If you show yourself as ready wi' your bunches o' fives as you are wi' yer tongue, and agree to fight me, I'll say to Zook that I'm sorry and won't worry 'im ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne

... sixth installment, beginning with the field gun, the famous "seventy-fives," the compiler of the report, after rehearsing the splendid qualities of this weapon—its power, its rapidity of action, and its precision—points out that it possesses a degree of strength and endurance which makes it an implement of war of the ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... says, may be expected hourly. The Uhlan wears a blue uniform turned up with yellow, and to the end of his lance is affixed a streamer intimately resembling a very dirty white pocket-handkerchief. Sometimes he hunts in couples, sometimes he goes in threes, and sometimes in fives. When he lights upon a village, he holds it to ransom; when he comes upon a city, he captures it, making it literally the prisoner of his bow and his spear. A writer in Blackwood's Magazine once drove the people of Lancashire to madness by declaring that, in ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland

... brother of Mr. Pitt Crawley. He was in the Dragoon Guards, a "blood about town," and an adept in boxing, rat-hunting, the fives-court, and four-in-hand driving. He was a young dandy, six feet high, with a great voice, but few brains. He could swear a great deal, but could not spell. He ordered about the servants, who nevertheless adored him; was generous, but did not pay his tradesmen; ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.

... wounded, and stated that about three o'clock that morning, as they were fishing, they were boarded by pirates, who threw fire-balls amongst them, burning them badly, and forcing them to leap into the water to save their fives, and then took possession of their boats. These waters are infested with pirates, who ostensibly pursue the avocation of fishermen, until an opportunity opens to catch men. The English navy did a great ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay

... Want to sell out? The fives are fallen three per cent. since Friday. All the 'Change is as busy as the devil ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour

... to meet fellows right along who pass as good men for a while, because they say they're good men; just as a lot of fives are in circulation which are accepted at their face value until they work up to the receiving teller. And you're going to see these men taking buzzards and coining eagles from them that will fool people ...
— Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer

... season showed all their glittering trinkets, and fluttered in the balmy air their splendor of many-colored flags. Longingly, here the children looked at the show; patiently the sunburned lasses plied their knitting as they paced the walk; courteously the passing townspeople, by fours and fives, and the passing visitors, by ones and twos, greeted each other, hat in hand; and slowly, slowly, the cripple and the helpless in their chairs on wheels came out in the cheerful noontide with the rest, and took their share of the blessed light ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins

... pencil, and a matchbox, and a handful of small change, and finally a cardcase. This last Duane opened feverishly—there were letters and checks, and two theater-tickets, and at last, in the back part, a wad of bills. He counted them—there was a twenty, five tens, four fives, and three ones. Duane drew a long breath. "That lets us ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair

... to 't—make free with it. I'll thank thee if thou emptiest it. The song Gives out that wine feeds love—It drowns it, man! If thou wilt neither hunt nor shoot, try games; Play at loggats, bowls, fives, dominoes, draughts, cribbage, Backgammon—special recipes for love! And you believe, for all the hate she shows, ...
— The Love-Chase • James Sheridan Knowles

... contrary to all my expectations, and I may say wishes, he has left me twenty-five thousand pounds in the fives. I only hold the money as my ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper

... Beats in Measure, or Measures in Period.—Groups of five seem to have no terrors for these people. In modern music it is extremely unusual to find notes grouped in fives, or measures having the rhythmic value of five beats, or periods made up of measures in fives. A study of the tabulation shows that the Tinguian have a rather natural bent for groupings in this number. It seems easy for ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole

... the games they wished to play, and compelled to play those for which they had no taste. It would be considered monstrous to remove a boy who was a capital bowler from the cricket-field, and make him go in for fives or racquets; or, to use an Eton illustration, to take a 'wet bob' who was a promising oarsman and might row in the school eight at Henley, and turn him into the playing-fields to become an ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst

... them seriously ill, only needing to be watched. I am very well, only I want some more exercise (which, by the bye, it is always in my power to take), and am quite as much disposed as ever to wish for a good game at tennis or fives to ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge

... however; even by that near prospect, he sauntered to his dressing-table, took up one of the pretty velvet and gold-filigreed absurdities, and shook out all the banknotes there were in it. There were fives and tens enough to count up 45 pounds. He reached over and caught up a five from a little heap lying loose on a novel of Du Terrail's, and tossed the whole across the room ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]

... well; he played Rugby football just not well enough to represent his college; he had been in the Lower Boats at Eton, and the Lent Boat of his first year at Cambridge; then he had given up rowing and played lawn-tennis in the summer and fives in the Lent Term just well enough to make a brisk and interesting game. He was not at all learned; he had reached the First Hundred at Eton, and had read Law at Cambridge—that convenient branch of study which for the most part ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson

... censorship of names and dates, became almost as impersonal as pages torn from fiction. Sitting comfortably at some cafe table, reading the papers with morning coffee, one saw the dawn coming up over the Oise and Aisne, heard the French "seventy-fives" and the heavy German siege-guns resume their roar; saw again, for the hundredth time, some hitherto unheard-of little man flinging away his life in one brief burst of glory. And these thrills, repeated over and over ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl

... ring coming into the voice, 'Ockley came for us. He used to be alive, you know—the Ockley who was keeper of the fives in my first half. I once pointed him out to mother. I was jolly glad he was the one who came for us. As soon as I saw it was Ockley I knew we should ...
— Echoes of the War • J. M. Barrie

... go beyond my own experience, and recall what I have heard him say of his love for sport, etc., I can think of a good deal, but much of it would be a repetition of what is contained in his 'Recollections.' At school he was fond of bat-fives, and this was the only game at which he was skilful. He was fond of his gun as quite a boy, and became a good shot; he used to tell how in South America he killed twenty-three snipe in twenty-four shots. In telling the story ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin

... short on his approach, but got down in two more, losing the hole with a five against that phenomenal three. Five is bogy and par for this hole, and sevens more common than fives. ...
— John Henry Smith - A Humorous Romance of Outdoor Life • Frederick Upham Adams

... says to Johnny Redlegs, "If I didn't have nine lives Your barrage would have got me With those lousy seventy-fives." He grins and puffs his corn-cob, And then he winks, reflective, And, "Buddy," says he, "you can't blame me If ...
— "I was there" - with the Yanks in France. • C. LeRoy Baldridge

... graves. I went down to the barbed-wire entanglements and examined them curiously. They at least were real. Once thousands of men had come up out of the little woods a quarter of a mile below; they had come on in that famous massed attack, they had come on in the face of machine gun and "seventy-fives." They had just reached the wires, which marked high water. In the woods below, the Bois de Facq, in the fields by the river 4,000 Germans had ...
— They Shall Not Pass • Frank H. Simonds

... right of the gate is a grand-stand, from which a fine view of the eleven or twelve acres of ground can be obtained. Along the west side run the principal buildings, including secretary's offices, grand-stands, tennis and fives courts, etc. The covered lawn-tennis courts are laid with great care and expense, the floors being of American maple, screwed and fitted over a patent wooden floor to insure absolute accuracy. The ladies' lawn-tennis championship ...
— Hammersmith, Fulham and Putney - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton

... and most unflattering opinions. He had won his cadetship through rigid competitive examination against all comers; he was a natural mathematician of whom a professor had said that he "could stand in the fives and wouldn't stand in the forties;" years of his boyhood spent in France had made him master of the colloquial forms of the court language of Europe, yet a dozen classmates who had never seen a French verb before ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King

... chance, I skinned off five fives from my little ol' bank-roll and passes 'em over to Mr. Holdup, an' then he picks up an' shuffles a deck of little cards an' deals me off ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various

... soda at the drug store to get one of his fives changed into ones, one of which he stowed away in his breast pocket, while the remainder was stuffed in his trousers after the manner of a man. He bent low over his handle bars, chewing rythmically and pedaled away rapidly in the ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill

... it plant or animal, is therefore nothing but a manifestation of the Divine idea of Platonism. Many instances of natural history offer striking illustrations, as when that which might have been a branch is developed into a flower, the parts thereof showing a disposition to arrange themselves by fives or by threes. The persistency with which this occurs in organisms of the same species, is, in the Platonic interpretation, a proof that, though individuals may perish, the idea is immortal. How else, in this manner, ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper

... embraces all the true pines. Comparing different kinds of pines, we find that they differ in the form of the cones, arrangement of the leaves, and other minor particulars. The form we have selected differs from all other native forms in its cones, and also in having the leaves in fives, instead of twos or threes, as in most other kinds. Therefore to distinguish the white pine from all other pines, it is given a ...
— Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany - For High Schools and Elementary College Courses • Douglas Houghton Campbell

... progressive type of parent, he became an educational reformer, and wrote upon modernizing the curriculum with increasing frequency to the TIMES. He expended a considerable fraction of his dwindling capital upon a science laboratory and a fives court; he added a London Bachelor of Science with a Teaching Diploma to the school staff, and a library of about a thousand volumes, including the Hundred Best Books as selected by the late Lord Avebury, to the school equipment. None of these things did anything but ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells

... across the street, lay in utter darkness, lights out, doors locked. There was no hope of using it as a short cut to the abris, or shelter, on the other side, while to try to go around it was almost certain death. The sky was ablaze with breaking shells from our seventy-fives; shrapnel was falling like hail in the streets, while the steady "pup-pup" of machine-guns—both our own and the bombing planes'—advised all who could to remain under shelter. The noise of our guns and of the bombs was like ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various

... as though there was something in him, never seemed to have much to say; and what he did say he would always unsay the next minute. He told me once that he considered cricket, on the whole, to be a gentleman-like game for boys, provided they would play without running about; and that fives, also, was a seemly game, so that those who played it never heated themselves. Henry once quarrelled with me for taking his sister Grizzel's part in a contest between them as to the best mode of using a watering-pot for the garden flowers; and from that day to this he has not ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope

... wary: I think they could see a person approaching when too far off to be distinguished themselves. In ascending the river few were seen; but in our quiet and rapid descent many, in pairs and by fours or fives, were observed. It was remarked that this bird did not expand its wings, when first starting at full speed, after the manner of the northern kind. In conclusion I may observe that the Struthio rhea inhabits the country of La Plata as far as a little ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin

... thousand roubles, and Deriganov offered thirty thousand on top of the mortgage to begin with. I saw how matters were, so I grabbed hold of him and bid forty. He went up to forty-five, I offered fifty-five. That means he went up by fives and I went up by tens.... Well, it came to an end. I bid ninety more than the mortgage; and it stayed with me. The cherry orchard is mine now, mine! [Roars with laughter] My God, my God, the cherry orchard's mine! Tell me I'm drunk, or mad, or dreaming.... ...
— Plays by Chekhov, Second Series • Anton Chekhov

... it impossible to keep his eyes from Bucky Smith and his beans. Bucky was the only one who seemed well fed, and his horror increased when Henry bent over him and said, in a low whisper: "He didn't get my beans fair. I had three aces and a pair, of deuces, an' he took it on three fives and two sixes. When I objected he called me a liar an' hit me. Them's my beans, or Sweedy's!" There was something almost like murder in ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood

... to the length of time which such errands should by right have occupied. The consequence was that not unfrequently towards the end of the hour a quarter of his pupils were gathered in what was known as the playshed, drinking sherbet, or playing cricket with a fives ball and ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery

... the prison; the European warder going rounds up to 10 p.m., and occasionally, with the Superintendent and his assistant, paying surprise night rounds. Convicts on the march out of prison were moved five abreast, or as they called it "panch-panch," literally, by "fives." ...
— Prisoners Their Own Warders - A Record of the Convict Prison at Singapore in the Straits - Settlements Established 1825 • J. F. A. McNair

... for ever, Tom. It's beyond all reason. I'm going to lay it down before all London at the Fives Courts next year, and it's to you that I want to hand it. I couldn't train down to it now, ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle

... with no affinity to any European tongue, and so difficult that it is popularly supposed that the Devil, after spending seven fruitless years in endeavouring to master it, gave up the attempt in despair. "Pelota" is the father of racquets and fives, and is an immemorially old game, going back, it is said, to the times of the Romans. Instead of using a racquet, it is played with a curved wicker basket strapped on to the right wrist. This basket is not unlike in shape to those wicker-work covers which in pre-taxi days were placed by London ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton

... that bright lance, against the fretted wall, Beneath the shade of stately banneral, Is slung with shining cuirass, sword, and shield? Where ye may see a spur in bloody field. Light-footed damsels move with gentle paces Round the wide hall, and show their happy faces; Or stand in courtly talk by fives and sevens: Like those fair stars that twinkle in the heavens. Yet must I tell a tale of chivalry: Or wherefore comes that knight so proudly by? Wherefore more proudly does the gentle knight, Rein in the swelling of his ...
— Poems 1817 • John Keats

... "Four fives, four tens, and five five-dollar gold-pieces." And the man displayed it ostentatiously. The tout's eyes flashed as he saw his opponent put his money back ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar

... and may you keep them as many more, and here is a gold dollar for the term;" and her mistress tossed her carelessly two fives in the precious metal. "See that I am not disturbed, and only admit as ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny

... thought—suppose there were other bears! He had often read of their coming in groups of fives and sixes. It was no time for him to sit limply on the ground. He caught up his rifle and recharged its empty chambers. Then before the tent door he sat until sunrise, anxiously scanning the dim pasture-land and the distant rocky ...
— The Story of Wool • Sara Ware Bassett

... This is the case in Thibet, in Siam, and cognate languages, in the Indian Archipelago and in the whole of Oceania, in Africa, and in many of the American peoples and tribes, where it is the origin of the decimal system. In Homer we find the verb [Greek: pempazein], to count in fives, and then for counting in general; in Lapland lokket, and in Finland lukea, to count, is derived from lokke, ten; and the Bambarese adang, to count, is the origin of ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli

... a boisterous gambling game which he called "Horrible Fives," wherein, although excitement ran high and players plunged, the limit was ten cents, and, on a lucky coup, the transient banker might win or lose as high as ninety cents, such coup requiring at least ten minutes to play out. This game went on at a big table at ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London

... CARVE. (Counting.) Twenty-one fives, and ten tens. That makes two hundred and five pounds. (Half to himself.) I always knew I was a bad lot—but where did I collar all that from? (To Janet.) I know what I shall do! I shall ...
— The Great Adventure • Arnold Bennett

... avoid fighting like cocks or brawling like geese, to the amusement of third parties. Indeed, when you get surfeited on that side, you come over to this, where there are, after all, such girls as Fours and Fives (Ssu Erh and Wu Erh) to dance attendance upon you. But such kind of things as ourselves uselessly defile fine names ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin

... put on his spectacles, and counted the money. "Ten tens are a hundred, ten fives are fifty, ten ones are ten," he said. "Perfectly correct." He put his hand into the inner pocket of his coat, and drew out a packet, which was tied roughly with a piece of coarse string. "And here are the letters," he added, ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace

... Russia has not the faintest glimmering of knowledge of the practice or even of the existence of such things as football, cricket, fives, rackets, golf, athletic sports, hockey, or any other of the numerous pastimes which play so important a part in the life of every schoolboy in this merry land of England. Therefore there is no question, for ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various

... that golf and lawn tennis are not fit school games; they are not painful enough. I am afraid we ought on the same ground to let racquets go, though for training in alertness and sheer skill, in the nice harmony of eye and hand racquets has no equal. But cricket, football, hockey, fives can all be painful enough; often victory is only to be won by a clinching of the teeth and the sternest resolve to "stick to it" in face of exhaustion. This is the merit of two forms of athletics which have been oftenest the subject of attack, rowing ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various

... is Arthur all this time? Words cannot paint the poor little fellow's distress. He couldn't muster courage to come up to the ring, but wandered up and down from the great fives'-court to the corner of the chapel rails, now trying to make up his mind to throw himself between them, and try to stop them; then thinking of running in and telling Mary, the matron, who he knew would instantly report it to the doctor. ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester

... windows? Let's see—it's red fours, black fives up?" remarked Tom, as he prepared the pack ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis

... no doubt, but I am confronted with sordid things to-day. The boys have just cleared off, and they are beginning to sweep out the schoolrooms. The inky, dreary desks, the ragged books, the odd fives-shoes in the pigeon-holes, the wheelbarrows full of festering orange-peel and broken-down fives-balls: this is not a place for a self-respecting person to be in. I want to be mooning about country lanes, with the smell of spring woods blowing down the valley. I want to be holding slow converse ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson

... that all?" some of the English public will exclaim. "Then you have done nothing. What about the boys' sports?" We foresaw the question, and when we left home some people felt uneasy as to what would happen to a school separated from its fives-courts and playing-fields. True, there was to be a beach, and the boys could amuse themselves by throwing stones into the sea: but when there were no more stones to throw—what then? The prospect was a ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine

... six rows each containing eight cards. In dealing these, you must be careful that there should never be two cards of equal value in the same perpendicular line. If, for example, two kings or two fives (the same, of course, applies to all the cards) were to be underneath each other, even though several other cards intervened between them, it would be useless to proceed. You must, therefore, consider the duplicate card as unavailable ...
— Lady Cadogan's Illustrated Games of Solitaire or Patience - New Revised Edition, including American Games • Adelaide Cadogan

... fellow, there is no more time, the French Government forbids it." Suddenly burst out of the loquacious opacity a dozen handfuls of Algeriens, their feet swaggering with fatigue, their eyes burning, apparently by themselves—faceless in the equally black mist. By threes and fives they assaulted the goblin who wailed and shook his withered fist in their faces. There was no train. It had been taken away by the French Government. "How do I know how the poilus can get back ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings

... the second son of a nobleman, whose ancient patrimony has been nearly dissipated between his evening parties at the club-houses, in French hazard, or Rouge et noir, and his morning speculations with his betting book at Tattersall's, Newmarket, or the Fives-court; whose industry in getting into debt is only exceeded by his indifference about getting out; whose acquired property (during his minority) and personals have long since been knocked down by the hammer ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle

... Fives, and tens, Threes and fours and twelves, All the volte face of decimals, The whirligig of dozens and the pinnacle of seven, Turn him on his back, The kicking little beetle, And there again, on his shell-tender, earth-touching belly, ...
— Tortoises • D. H. Lawrence

... among the first two fives to be called to the floor. Always to be depended upon in bygone high school days, she had not fallen off as a player. During the fifteen minutes of brisk play, she was conspicuous by reason of her clever work with the ball. Watching her eagerly, Marjorie ...
— Marjorie Dean, College Sophomore • Pauline Lester

... trustee. "And I'm goin' to move that it needn't be paid, either. When Brother Winch, here, began hollerin' out those extra twenty-fives and fifties, that evening, it was under a complete misapprehension. He'd be'n on the Cheese Board that same Monday afternoon, and he'd done what he thought was a mighty big stroke of business, and ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic

... excellent pronunciation. He has never been out of Japan. Two little girls and a young boy appeared after dinner and made their pretty bows to the floor, and then went to a low table and squatted and played Go the rest of the evening. Go is the famous shell game. Go means five and it is a game of fives, but ask me no more, except that the men are 364 in number and you play it on an expanded checker board. There was an endless succession of food and drinks and we did not leave till nearly eleven. ...
— Letters from China and Japan • John Dewey

... game. In this connection it will be important to remember that there were two English games called "rounders," but entirely distinct the one from the other. Johnson's Dictionary, edition of 1876, describes the first, and presumably the older, as similar to "fives" or hand-ball, while the second is the game supposed to be allied to base-ball. "Fives" is one of the oldest of games, and if it or a similar game was called "rounders," it will require something ...
— Base-Ball - How to Become a Player • John M. Ward

... compare him with one of the lads who belong to the classes now held in the building of the old Polytechnic; or with the lads who are found every evening at the classes of the Birkbeck. First of all, the young workman cannot play any game at all, neither cricket, football, tennis, racquets, fives, or any of the other games which the young fellows in the class above him love so passionately: there are, in fact, no places for him where these games can be played; for though the boys may play cricket in Victoria Park, I do not understand that the ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant

... place for the storehouse, which is nine fathoms long, three wide, and twelve feet high, he adopted the plan for his own house, which he had promptly built by good workmen, and then assigned to each one his location. Straightway, the men began to gather together by fives and sixes, each according to his desire. Then all set to work to clear up the island, to go to the woods, to make the frame work, to carry earth and other ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 2 • Samuel de Champlain

... a model of sobriety, but the excitement of "fives" when he looked for "threes" was too ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy

... of the place were seated, and passing in at the wicket, entered the prison. The noise and the crowd, the life and the shouting, the shabby bustle of the place, struck and excited Pen. People moved about ceaselessly and restless, like caged animals in a menagerie. Men were playing at fives. Others pacing and tramping: this one in colloquy with his lawyer in dingy black—that one walking sadly, with his wife by his side, and a child on his arm. Some were arrayed in tattered dressing-gowns, and had a look of rakish ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray

... year later Diggory and Jack Vance were sauntering arm in arm across one of the fives-courts ...
— The Triple Alliance • Harold Avery

... team, did ye? If you belonged in Barville you might howl your head off; but as long's you camp around these diggin's you won't do no rooting for them fellers. I'm going to keep right on your co't-tail the rest of the time, and the first yip you make I'll hand ye a bunch of fives straight from the shoulder. Now, don't make no further gab to me unless you're thirsting to wear a mark of my esteem ...
— Rival Pitchers of Oakdale • Morgan Scott

... do with all this yere mazuma?" asked Bud, looking over the stacks of fifties, twenties, tens, and fives that lay on the table around which they were sitting in the living room, and which was flanked by piles of gold and a few ...
— Ted Strong's Motor Car • Edward C. Taylor



Words linked to "Fives" :   Britain, UK, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, U.K., Great Britain



Copyright © 2024 Free Translator.org