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TWENTY-ONE
| Pronunciation (US): |  | (GB): | |
I. (noun)
Sense 1
Meaning:
A gambling game using cards; the object is to hold cards having a higher count than those dealt to the banker up to but not exceeding 21
Synonyms:
blackjack; twenty-one; vingt-et-un
Classified under:
Nouns denoting acts or actions
Hypernyms ("twenty-one" is a kind of...):
card game; cards (a game played with playing cards)
Sense 2
Meaning:
The cardinal number that is the sum of twenty and one
Synonyms:
Classified under:
Nouns denoting quantities and units of measure
Hypernyms ("twenty-one" is a kind of...):
large integer (an integer equal to or greater than ten)
II. (adjective)
Sense 1
Meaning:
Being one more than twenty
Synonyms:
21; twenty-one; xxi
Classified under:
Similar:
cardinal (being or denoting a numerical quantity but not order)
Context examples:
Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.
(Emma, by Jane Austen)
I had slept twenty-one hours.
(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)
The nurseries for children of ordinary gentlemen, merchants, traders, and handicrafts, are managed proportionably after the same manner; only those designed for trades are put out apprentices at eleven years old, whereas those of persons of quality continue in their exercises till fifteen, which answers to twenty-one with us: but the confinement is gradually lessened for the last three years.
(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)
And he was only twenty-one, and he had never been in love before.
(Martin Eden, by Jack London)
They have likewise discovered two lesser stars, or satellites, which revolve about Mars; whereof the innermost is distant from the centre of the primary planet exactly three of his diameters, and the outermost, five; the former revolves in the space of ten hours, and the latter in twenty-one and a half; so that the squares of their periodical times are very near in the same proportion with the cubes of their distance from the centre of Mars; which evidently shows them to be governed by the same law of gravitation that influences the other heavenly bodies.
(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)
On Friday night he finished the serial, twenty-one thousand words long.
(Martin Eden, by Jack London)
Twenty—almost twenty-one.
(Martin Eden, by Jack London)
It was true the serial was twenty-one thousand words, and they offered to pay him sixteen dollars on publication, which was something like seventy-five cents a thousand words; but it was equally true that it was the second thing he had attempted to write and that he was himself thoroughly aware of its clumsy worthlessness.
(Martin Eden, by Jack London)
Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax.
(The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald)
