Word.ws English Dictionary

chainies

chainies noun: pieces of broken pottery or crockery, sometimes used to play a children's housekeeping game.

Noun

chainies pl (plural only)

  1. (Ireland, colloquial, plural, plural-only) Pieces of broken pottery or crockery, sometimes used to play a children's housekeeping game.
    • One party was quietly playing ‘chanies’, as they called house-keeping with pieces of broken pottery.1897, W. B. Yeats, The Secret Rose, page 171
    • Silly-Milly burying the little dead bird in the kitchen matchbox, a daisychain and bits of broken chainies on the grave.1922 February 2, James Joyce, “[Episode 6: Hades]”, in Ulysses, Paris: Shakespeare and Company […], →OCLC, part II [Odyssey], page 109

Origin of chainies

From a regional variant of china + -ies.

Questions about chainies

What does chainies mean?
Chainies means pieces of broken pottery or crockery, sometimes used to play a children's housekeeping game.
What part of speech is chainies?
Chainies is a noun.

Words near chainies in the dictionary

  1. chaingangers
  2. chainguard
  3. chainguards
  4. chaingun
  5. chainguns
  6. chainies
  7. chainik
  8. chainiks
  9. chaininess
  10. chaining
  11. chaining up

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: chainies (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.

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