bar-sinister

Let us never be guilty of the reverse, -- a bar-sinister piece of furniture!

The Art of Interior Decoration Grace Wood

"I am sorry, instead of a fortune, to give them a bar-sinister."

The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 07, No. 39, January, 1861 Various

This want of taste runs across the character like an intellectual bar-sinister, forcing us to believe that their conclusions are anything but legitimate.

Manners and Social Usages Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood

Think of the sisters, living along with a hidden heart-ache, nursing in secret the knowledge, that somewhere in the world were those dear to them, from whom they were shut out by a bar-sinister terribly real, and for whose welfare, with all the generous truth of a sister's feeling, they would barter everything, yet who were in an unending danger!

The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 05, No. 30, April, 1860 Various

_Our_ branch of that great family, I confess, bore the bar-sinister.

Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 Various

She might even claim that she had been cheated, for if she ought to have known that she was marrying a nobody, she could not guess that he had a bar-sinister or a disreputable father.

The Highwayman 1919

This one was "rowdy"; that one was over-dressed; another did not ride quite straight to hounds; in the pedigree of another a bar-sinister was more than suspected.

Zuleika Dobson, or, an Oxford love story Max Beerbohm 1914

This one was "rowdy"; that one was over-dressed; another did not ride quite straight to hounds; in the pedigree of another a bar-sinister was more than suspected.

Zuleika Dobson 1911

There is a bar-sinister on the escutcheon of many a noble term, and if, in an access of formalism, we refuse hospitality to some item of questionable repute, our descendants may be deprived of a linguistic jewel.

Alone Norman Douglas 1910

The Black Colonel, a man with a bar-sinister, but a remarkable man, was the hunted, and two companies of King George's soldiers, decent fellows enough each man of them, were the hunters.

The Black Colonel James Milne 1908