blackride
blackride noun: a student prank in the early 1800s that involved students wearing red coats, blackening their faces, and riding about campus with torches at night on horses stolen from the faculty.
Noun
blackride (plural blackrides)
- A student prank in the early 1800s that involved students wearing red coats, blackening their faces, and riding about campus with torches at night on horses stolen from the faculty.
- The "blackride" was after this manner: four or five riders, half masked, with their faces blacked, and their bodies dressed in red flannel coats, with flaming torches of camphene in their hands, galloped furiously up and down the campus, waving their flambeaux; the students crowding out of their...1910, The Sewanee Review - Volume 18, page 337
- Charles Woodward Hutson, of the class of 1860 at the University of South Carolina, would have nothing to do with attempts to shield students who had participated in a "blackride"; he was disgusted with the rowdyism […]1944, Albea Godbold, The Church College of the Old South, page 175
Examples of blackride in a sentence
- Friday night we had a beautiful sight— a blackride in the Campus.1952, Edgar Wallace Knight, A Documentary History of Education in the South Before 1860:
- To rile their professors, South Carolina students staged 'blackrides,' when they blackened their faces, stole the horses of faculty, and galloped about campus while holding flaming torches.2019, Alan Taylor, Thomas Jefferson's Education, page 97:
Forms of blackride
| plural | blackrides |
|---|
Origin of blackride
From black + ride.
Words formed from blackride
Questions about blackride
- What does blackride mean?
- Blackride means a student prank in the early 1800s that involved students wearing red coats, blackening their faces, and riding about campus with torches at night on horses stolen from the faculty.
- How do you use blackride in a sentence?
- Friday night we had a beautiful sight— a blackride in the Campus.
- What part of speech is blackride?
- Blackride is a noun.
- What is the plural of blackride?
- The plural of blackride is blackrides.
Words near blackride in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: blackride (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “blackride.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/blackride. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.