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Thimblerig   Listen
noun
Thimblerig  n.  A sleight-of-hand trick played with three small cups, shaped like thimbles, and a small ball or little pea.



verb
Thimblerig  v. t.  (past & past part. thimblerigged; pres. part. thimblerigging)  To swindle by means of small cups or thimbles, and a pea or small ball placed under one of them and quickly shifted to another, the victim laying a wager that he knows under which cup it is; hence, to cheat by any trick.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Thimblerig" Quotes from Famous Books



... back, as if it had been a pilgrimage or religious duty, while meantime there was always a kind of Russian carnival on the ice, oxen being sometimes roasted whole, and all kinds of "fakirs," as they are now termed, selling doughnuts, spruce-beer, and gingerbread, or tempting the adventurous with thimblerig; many pedestrians stopping at the old-fashioned inn on Smith's Island for hot punch. Juleps and cobblers, and the "one thousand and one American fancy drinks," were not as yet invented, and men drank themselves unto the devil quite as easily on rum or brandy straight, peach and ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland

... travelers; stratagem &c (artifice) 702; confidence trick, fake, hoax; theft &c 791; ballot-box stuffing [U.S.], barney [Slang]; brace game [Slang], bunko game, drop game [Slang], gum game [U.S.], panel game [U.S.], shell game, thimblerig, skin game [U.S.]. snare, trap, pitfall, decoy, gin; springe^, springle^; noose, hoot; bait, decoy-duck, tub to the whale, baited trap, guet-a-pens; cobweb, net, meshes, toils, mouse trap, birdlime; dionaea^, Venus's flytrap^; ambush &c 530; trapdoor, sliding panel, false ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... where ballet-girls in short dresses perform very modern-looking pirouettes; of exercises in wrestling, games of ball, games of chance like chess or checkers, of throwing knives at a mark, of the modern thimblerig, wooden dolls for children, curiously carved wooden boxes, dice, and toy-balls. There are men and women playing on harps, flutes, pipes, cymbals, trumpets, drums, guitars, and tambourines. Glass was, till recently, believed to be a modern invention, unknown to the ancients. ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke



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