English

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Alternative forms

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Etymology

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From two +‎ up.

Pronunciation

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Noun

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two-up (uncountable)

  1. (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

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Translations

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See also

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Adjective

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two-up (not comparable)

  1. (of a printed document) Having two document pages per printed page.
    Hypernym: N-up

Adverb

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two-up (not comparable)

  1. (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

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