nines
- 1Plural of nine.
The winning ticket ended in two nines.
All the nines on the old clock face had faded.
Note
An ordinary -s plural that serves every sense of nine at once: faded digits on a clock face, cards with nine pips, nine-millimeter pistols, rival baseball nines. One use leans plural by habit. The unit that measures reliability or purity is normally counted in nines rather than spoken of as a single nine. For the card-table hand, see the poker slang for a pair.
- 2In poker, two cards of the rank nine held together as a matching pair.
He raised hard, confident his nines would hold up against a single overcard.
Pocket nines are tricky to play from early position.
Note
Card-table shorthand: the bare plural names the hand, so a player simply has nines or draws nines without saying "a pair of." In this use the word is plural-only, since a single nine is just a card. As pairs go, nines sit in the middle. They are strong enough to play but exposed when higher pairs or overcards appear on the board. It is slang and belongs at the table.
nines is a form of nine
nine, noun: The written character or figure that stands for the number 9. Full entry
- Forms
- ninenines plural
- Spelling
- nine → nines: add -s
- Sound
- The ending sounds like /z/.
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