NOUN
- a swindling sleight-of-hand game; victim guesses which of three things a pellet is under
How To Use thimblerig In A Sentence
- To play fast and loose now means to behave in a deceitful or irresponsible manner. shell game This old gambling game (earlier known as thimblerig), in which the operator openly places a pea under one of three walnut shells, then rapidly shifts the shells around and challenges a sucker to bet on the location of the pea, has given its name to any kind of chicanery or subterfuge. VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly Vol XIII No 2
- There was Dr. Bennett, a riverboat gambler who invented thimblerig and could still outwit the best of them at 70.
- Find the Lady is, except for the props used, essentially the same as the probably centuries-older shell game or thimblerig.
- Telling the Bees," "Hey for the Ferry!" and two in the style of Frith, all thimblerig and crinolines, given them by Swithin. Complete Project Gutenberg John Galsworthy Works
- In these circumstances, and smarting as I was under the recollection of recent defeat, it is not strange that I thought I detected the old political ruse of dressing the wolf in sheep's clothing, of using handsome pledges as a mask to deceive the gullible, and that I assumed that this scholarly amateur in politics was being used for their own purposes by masters and veterans in the old game of thimblerig. Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him
- Select your character and find it hidden beneath one of the three containers in the game of thimblerig.
- And yet every day one saw more distinctly that they were the pea in the thimblerig of life, the hub of a universe which, to the approbation of the majority they represented, they were fast making uninhabitable. The Best British Short Stories of 1922
- But the only object of this argument is to show how mal-adroitly Mr. Landor plays at thimblerig. Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 53, No. 330, April 1843
- Your genuine pietist would find a mystical sense in thimblerig. The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley
- Our artist then can cover up faces, and yet show them quite clearly, as in the thimblerig group; or he can do without faces altogether; or he can, at a pinch, provide a countenance for a gentleman out of any given object — a beautiful Irish physiognomy being moulded upon a keg of whiskey; and a jolly George Cruikshank