game1
/ɡeɪm
/- Rugby enthusiasts gave up on the sport after the game was dragged in the mud.
- Earlier this year, the house teams competed in friendly rivalry games of cricket, football and volleyball.
Synonyms
- In 14 World Cup games in five previous tournaments Korea had not won a match.
- Some will simply enjoy the games as a sporting event.
- Granagh Youth Club hope to be involved in a number of events in the county games competitions.
- He would not have done so had he not discovered this talent in our games lesson.
- He said had been at his games lesson for only 15 minutes when the headteacher took him to his office, where police were called.
- The sound of a typical high school games lesson vibrates beneath us, but our gaze is fixed for two, maybe three minutes.
- This Indian team has several batsmen who can raise their game to attain this level.
- We've proved we can win games, it's a case now of making sure we raise our game and get quality performances when we need them.
- Not one to stand still, he is determined to raise his game to a new level.
- There will be games, amusements and activities for all the family.
- This club provides weekly activities, games and amusement for the youth.
- But few other games really engage the intellect, instead of just the reflexes.
Synonyms
- The money was to purchase equipment for the club, including computers, games, furniture and arts and crafts materials.
- Monopoly is Hasbro's largest selling board game with 1.5m games sold per year.
- Gradually I bought a few more games and even managed to meet a few other players.
- We will just try our hardest and concentrate on our final few games to get the results we need.
- Amazingly there were to be only two further scores in the final period of the game.
- When he cleaned up in the final innings of the game, he was fully vindicated.
- The eighth seed broke him in the third game of the match and from then on broke serve at will.
- The Swiss calmly wrapped up the victory on the first of three match points a game later.
- Sutton's Dave and Julie were the best couple in both matches winning 27 games in each fixture.
- A game may be made in more than one deal, such as by scoring 60 and later 40, or it may be scored by making a larger bid and earning 100 or more points in a single deal.
- The main thing coming into the professional game is that I didn't know where to work or what they were expecting from me.
- Trade and economic growth are positive-sum games, in which there can be winners without losers.
- It often seems to be about performance, parliamentary games and all that type of nonsense.
- This is all down to the secret game of politics they are playing.
- Our game of secret messages is a little one-sided as his referrals don't seem to work properly.
- Robertson, soulless puppetmaster that he is, says that the plans are just games.
Synonyms
- The browns and tans and whites of poised game can blend with the background foliage.
- They were very much plant eaters, hunting live game for either the sport or the bones to construct their settlements.
- Home of the Bushmen, the arid reaches of the Kalahari has some spectacularly wild and remote game viewing areas.
- Foods to avoid include red meat, particularly game, offal, beef, pork and lamb.
- He insists that all the meat is Scottish and the seafood, game, fruit and vegetables are local and delivered each day.
- The seafood and game are excellent, and the staff insist on knowing what you plan to prepare and giving advice.
Synonyms
- The city of Oxford has a game of swans by prescription.
- In order to have an understanding of what the conveyance of a game of swans by a London citizen to the College meant, it should be observed that the kingdom of England was divided into swan areas of large size.
- You shall be of good behaviour toward the game of swans.
- Saturday's match saw a good turnout of players eager to get game time prior to the league season.
- Game for a laugh is Denis, but I digress.
- If you want others to be game, you've got to also be game yourself once in a while.
Synonyms
- The problem is, such systems can be gamed.
- That company is a case in point, where they create a "market failure" by gaming the system in their favor.
- He was gaming the Time magazine most influential person poll.
- Contemporary interests include the phenomenon of fan culture and video gaming.
- Nintendo has been around longer than video gaming and it most likely will stay that way forever.
- Has there been a big enough paradigm shift in our culture to create a change in gaming?
- Down below, the regular punters swarm around hundreds of baize gaming tables.
- When the first gaming casino was established on a reserve, a SWAT team took the chief away in chains.
- Now it is home to the main shopping mall and gaming rooms of the Casino complex.
Synonyms
Phrases
ahead of (or behind) the game
back (or still) in the game
beat someone at their own game
the game is up
game on
game over
game, set, and match
the Great Game
make (a) game of
off (or on) one's game
on the game
the only game in town
out of the game
play someone's game
play the game
play games
what's your (or the) game?
Derivatives
gameness
/ noun ...- One thing that gets you about these Paralympians is their sense of shrug-off gameness about ignored or forgotten injuries.
- When chemotherapy took her hair from her she once donned a Rastafarian wig, and we all laughed at the hair gone by and her gameness in donning such an unlikely wig.
- If gameness won fights, Paulie would still be a champion.
gamester
/ noun ...- Ford's Volvo is so pleased with the effect of its games that it has put gamesters into a TV commercial, and plans its own game for consoles such as Sony's PlayStation.
- The work's oversized video projections scrutinize the mesmerized, slightly twitching faces of young gamesters as they maneuver, kill and die in the cyber realm of a network combat game.
- ‘The extended multimedia instructions only benefit a tiny minority of gamesters,’ said the US manufacturer.
Origin
Old English gamen 'amusement, fun', gamenian 'play, amuse oneself', of Germanic origin.
The original meaning of game, dating back to Old English, was ‘amusement, fun, or pleasure’. Shakespeare uses it in this sense in Love's Labour's Lost: ‘We have had pastimes here and pleasant game’. Other early meanings included ‘a jest or joke’, and ‘a laughing stock’. The sense of an ‘animal hunted’ (Late Middle English) developed from the earlier sense of ‘pleasure of the hunt’. The adjective sense ‘full of fight, spirited’ (now used also to mean ‘ready and willing’), comes from a use of the noun as a term for a fighting cock. Australians say that a brave person is as game as Ned Kelly, referring to the 19th-century outlaw and folk hero who led a band of horse and cattle thieves and bank raiders. To be on the game is to be involved in prostitution. Although the expression dates from the late 19th century, the use of game to mean ‘sexual activity’ is much older, as in Shakespeare's reference to ‘daughters of the game’ in Troilus and Cressida. At one time, being on the game was also thieves' slang for thieving or housebreaking. Rather different from playing the game, behaving in a fair or honourable way or abiding by the rules. The expression is recorded from the late 19th century and memorably used in Henry Newbolt's poem ‘Vitai Lampada’ (1897), celebrating public school values: ‘And it's not for the sake of a ribboned coat, / Or the selfish hope of a season's fame, / But his Captain's hand on his shoulder smote – / ‘Play up! play up! And play the game!’
People say game in situations, especially in sport, when one side has suddenly got themselves back into a contest and anyone can still win. The expression comes from darts, where it signals the start of play. Game meaning ‘injured, lame’ (late 18th century) as in game leg was apparently originally north Midland dialect (as gam) but its origin is unknown. A variant dialect form of game is gammy which in the mid 19th century meant ‘bad, false’.
Rhymes
game2
/ɡeɪm/- I could still make a go of it, even with my game leg, with a few chickens and my garden.
Origin
Late 18th century: originally dialect, of unknown origin.
- (all) of a piece
- all-of-a-pieceness
- (all) of a sudden
- all of a tremble
- allogamous
- allogamy
- allogeneic
- allogeneity
- allogeneous
- allogenic
- allogenous
- allograft
- allograph
- allographic
- allogrooming
- alloimmune
- alloimmunisation
- alloimmunity
- alloimmunization
- allokine
- allolog
- allometric
- allometron
- allometry
- allomone