Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. A gambling game in which the dealer shows a player three cards, then turns them face down and moves them around, and the player must guess the position of a particular card.
Wiktionary
- n. A confidence game in which the victim, or mark, is tricked into betting a sum of money that they can find the money card, for example the queen of hearts, among three face-down playing cards.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. a gambling game using playing cards, in which a dealer shows a bettor three cards face up and specifies one to be identified, and after the cards are turned face down and moved around quickly, the bettor must identify which of the three cards is the specified card. It is sometimes engaged in by dealers on the streets of a city, with bets made by passers-by.
WordNet 3.0
- n. a gambling card game of Spanish origin; 3 or 4 cards are dealt face up and players bet that one of them will be matched before the others as the cards are dealt from the pack one at a time
Examples
“It was hard not to interpret Hastings’s harsh language as an indication of what might have occurred had Theresa Cedillo never attended an ARI/DAN! conference, never met Andrew Wakefield or Arthur Krigsman, never gotten caught up in a theory that, when all the cards were on the table, proved to be a bit of chicanery barely worthy of a boardwalk three-card monte dealer.”
“To watch Pernell “Sweet-Pea” Whitaker practice the sweet science of boxing was akin to watching a three-card monte player take the money of a hapless sucker.”
“The back section was closed off but they were still practically empty — a few knots of tourates on their way home from Universal Studios clumped together in the middle of the room, a couple of druggates asleep against the back wall, three others over by the far side wall, laying out three-card monte hands on the yellow warning strip, one lone Marilyn.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘three-card monte’.
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You're Such a Card
birthday card, postcard, cue card, poker card, cardiologist, index card, business card, cardamom, Orson Scott Card, Cardinalis cardin..., aperture card, trading card and 47 more...
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The Raff of Con
Words associated with grifting and other fraud. Watch your wallet!
scam, swindle, fraud, hoax, matchstick men, nigeria, 419, phishing, pretext, misdirection, pickpocket, cheat and 49 more...
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Gambling and Gaming
baize, tesserarian, ambidexter, blue chip, one-armed bandit, monte-bank, dicing-house, croupier, hazard, hazardry, gord, junket and 68 more...
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