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FARTHING
| Pronunciation (US): |  | (GB): | |
I. (noun)
Sense 1
Meaning:
A former British bronze coin worth a quarter of a penny
Classified under:
Nouns denoting possession and transfer of possession
Hypernyms ("farthing" is a kind of...):
coin (a flat metal piece (usually a disc) used as money)
Context examples:
“If I hadn't a family, and that family hadn't the cowpock,” said the waiter, “I wouldn't take a sixpence. If I didn't support a aged pairint, and a lovely sister,”—here the waiter was greatly agitated—“I wouldn't take a farthing.
(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)
They lives rough, and they risk swinging, but they eat and drink like fighting-cocks, and when a cruise is done, why, it's hundreds of pounds instead of hundreds of farthings in their pockets.
(Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson)
As it stands, not one farthing shall you have with my free will, and when I see my brother, the Socman of Minstead, he will raise hue and cry from vill to vill, from hundred to hundred, until you are taken as a common robber and a scourge to the country.
(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
The pecuniary means of meeting our expenses, kept down to the utmost farthing, are obtained from him with great difficulty, and even under fearful threats that he will Settle himself (the exact expression); and he inexorably refuses to give any explanation whatever of this distracting policy.
(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)
