dozens
- 1Plural of dozen.
Dozens of volunteers showed up to clean the park.
The factory ships dozens of crates every week.
Note
The plural most often carries the loose, counting-by-eye meaning of dozen rather than the exact one. Dozens of volunteers means many: comfortably more than ten or twelve, well short of a couple hundred, and nobody expects a multiple of twelve. The same spelling with the in front names something else entirely, the insult game.
- 2A verbal game in which two or more players exchange increasingly witty insults, each trying to outdo the last.
Like a rap battle fought with insults instead of rhymed verses.
Two teenagers squared off in a heated round of the dozens outside the barbershop.
She held her own in the dozens, firing back an insult sharper than the one thrown at her.
Note
A game from African American Vernacular English, and grammatically a fixed plural: it is almost always the dozens, with no singular form. A single insult has its own name. Lewis R. Gordon's Existentia Africana (2013) calls one a "snap" and places the game beside signifying and dissin', the clever side of insult, where wit counts for more than wounding.
dozens is a form of dozen
dozen, noun: A set of twelve things considered together as one group. Full entry
- Forms
- dozen also pluraldozens plural
- Spelling
- dozen → dozens: add -s
- Sound
- The ending sounds like /z/.
Use it in a sentence
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