sice

Formssices, sicing, siced

1. 1
   noun

   Alternative spelling of sais.

   The sice walked behind the carriage, ready to tend the horses at every halt.

   Colonial households often employed a sice to manage the stables and grooming.

   Note

   A variant spelling of sais, the word used in India for a groom or servant who looks after the horses. A third spelling, syce, is the usual one for its dated meaning of chauffeur or driver. The plural is sices. Do not confuse it with the dice-game "six", which is spelled the same but is a separate word.

2. 2
   nounobsolete

   The number six in a throw of the dice during a game.

   A lucky sice carried his counter home before the others could catch up.

   The gambler cursed when his final cast turned up a deuce instead of a sice.

   Note

   An obsolete gamester's name for the six. It came into English from Old French sis through Anglo-Norman, so it is a doublet of six itself. It could count throws as well as faces: Thomas Godwyn, writing of Roman dicing in 1680, calls the luckiest cast "three Sices." Readers will meet it in older texts, but modern players simply say six.

3. 3
   verbslangtransitive

   To excite or energize someone, getting them worked up about something.

   The DJ knew exactly how to sice the room before the headliner came on.

   Talk of the championship siced the entire neighborhood.

   Similarhype, excite, energize

   Oppositecalm

   Note

   A piece of Washington, D.C. slang that lives mostly in its past participle: people more often say they are siced than say that something sices them. It takes about, for or to (siced about going, siced for a trip, siced to be off work), and sice someone up serves as the active form. Keep it to casual speech, and don't confuse it with the dice term for six, which is a separate word.

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