guinea

Pluralguineas

1. 1
   countryproper noun · Guinea

   A country in West Africa whose official name is the Republic of Guinea.

   The mining company signed a new agreement with the government of Guinea.

   Guinea shares a border with both Sierra Leone and Liberia.

2. 2
   gold coinnounhistoricalBritishcountable

   A British gold coin first worth twenty shillings, later fixed at twenty-one shillings from 1717 until decimal currency was adopted.

   The doctor charged a guinea for each visit, a fee only wealthy families could pay.

   However, since there are 488 pages in all for a bargain price of a guinea one must not be too carping.

   1962, “New Reading on Railways: Locomotives of British Railways, by H. C. Casserley & L. Asher, Spring Books, 21s.”, in Modern Railways

   Note

   The coin is named for the source of its gold: Guinea, West Africa's old name, and above all the Gold Coast, now Ghana; the first guineas served the African trade. Long after it was fixed at twenty-one shillings, the guinea remained a way to state a price, so a review headed New Reading on Railways in June 1962 could call 488 pages a bargain at a guinea.

3. 3
   farm birdnouncountable

   A bird known as the guinea fowl, which is found in West Africa and kept as poultry.

   The guineas set up a loud racket whenever a stranger drove into the farmyard.

   She keeps a guinea or two with the chickens to keep the ticks down.

   Note

   Farmyard talk shortens guinea fowl to guinea, and the bird shares its name's source with the gold coin: both come from Guinea, the West African coast where the bird is found. The short form sits easily in the plural beside other poultry, as in Emily Carr's The House of All Sorts (1944): "The guineas peeped complainingly, the goslings waddled into all the puddles."

4. 4
   coast regionproper noun · Guineahistorical

   The coastal region of West Africa stretching between Morocco and the Congo, especially the northern shore of the Gulf of Guinea.

   Portuguese ships worked their way down the coast of Guinea in search of gold and trade.

   On eighteenth-century maps, Guinea stretches along the shore of the great gulf that still bears its name.

   Note

   In early modern usage the name covers a long stretch of shore rather than a state, and it survives in the Gulf of Guinea. In older writing, read Guinea as that coast, which took in the Gold Coast of present-day Ghana, rather than the modern republic, which holds only a short piece of it.

5. 5
   ethnic insultnounslangderogatoryethnicslurUScountable

   An offensive ethnic slur, used in the US, for a person of Italian descent.

   Note

   The slur targets Italian Americans, and readers mostly meet it in fiction, in a character's voice: the narrator of Stephen King's Survivor Type (1982), born in New York's Little Italy, calls his father "an Old World guinea." Even from an insider it carries contempt, so it is a word to recognize on the page and never to use of a person.

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