two-up
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English
[edit]Alternative forms
[edit]Etymology
[edit]Pronunciation
[edit]Audio (General Australian): (file)
Noun
[edit]two-up (uncountable)
- (Australia, New Zealand, games) A game of chance, played by betting on the outcome of two pennies thrown in the air.
- 1993, Ernest Hunter, Aboriginal Health and History: Power and Prejudice in Remote Australia[1], page 242:
- From the image of a wily digger playing two-up, to a prime minister at the track or the tables, the construction of gambling is as an activity quintessentially Australian.
- 1994, David Malcolm Grant, On a Roll: A History of Gambling and Lotteries in New Zealand[2], page 66:
- The origins of two-up remain obscure. It probably derived from ‘pitch and toss’, a game British youths had played since the late eighteenth century. In Australia pitch and toss was first recorded in the 1850s on the Victorian goldfields, and in New Zealand as a street game on the West Coast in the early 1870s. Two-up evolved as a variant, becoming popular in Australia in the early 1890s, and in New Zealand a year or two later, as labouring men from both countries traversed the Tasman Sea in search of work.
- 2008, Sam De Brito, The Lost Boys[3], page 280:
- Perversely, Scorps chooses not to punt on Anzac Day and won′t go near two-up, probably because his losses will be too public.
Synonyms
[edit]- (gambling game): kangaroo craps (US), swy, swy-up
Translations
[edit]a game of chance
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See also
[edit]- cross and pile — similar coin-tossing game
- three-up
Adjective
[edit]two-up (not comparable)
- (of a printed document) Having two document pages per printed page.
- Hypernym: N-up
Adverb
[edit]two-up (not comparable)
- (manner, of travel on a motorcycle) With two people aboard.
- Some of us rode two-up as we travelled in convoy to the beach.
See also
[edit]Categories:
- English compound terms
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- English nouns
- English uncountable nouns
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- en:Games
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- English adverbs
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- en:Two-up