straights

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of straight.

   The cyclists picked up speed along the straights before the sharp bends.

   Several straights came up during the late rounds of the poker tournament.

   Note

   One spelling covers a wide spread of plurals. On a road or racetrack, straights are the unbent stretches between curves. At the card table, they are five-card sequences. In slang, they are heterosexual people, conventional people in mainstream society, or ordinary tobacco cigarettes as opposed to marijuana. Chiropractors who use spinal adjustment alone are straights too. The plural is always a regular -s, so only context tells these apart.

2. 2
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present indicative of straight.

   Note

   Here the -s marks a present-tense verb, not a plural. The verb means the same as straighten and takes an object: someone or something straights a rod, a wire or a rope. It describes making a thing straight, not a thing becoming straight on its own. The spelling is identical to the plural noun, and only the sentence around it shows which one is meant.

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