cornfield meet
Syllables: corn·field meet/ˈkɔːnfiːld ˌmiːt//ˈkɔɹnˌfild ˌmit/
cornfield meet noun: an accidental head-on collision or near head-on collision of two trains.
Noun
cornfield meet (plural cornfield meets)
- An accidental head-on collision or near head-on collision of two trains.
- Do you think it's possible for two trains to have a cornfield meet right in the middle of an automatically protected block? Of course it is, if one of the hoggers is drunk or asleep at the throttle […]1943, Railroad Magazine, volume 34, New York, N.Y.: Frank A[ndrew] Munsey Co., →ISSN, →OCLC, page 100, column 1
- One such instance when a conductor failed to follow a prescribed timetable resulted in a head-on smashup on the Long Island Railroad at the end of the Civil War. On August 28, 1865, General Grant and General Sherman collided in a pasture at Jamaica, New York. Five passengers were killed in this...1968, Robert C[arroll] Reed, “Head-on Collisions”, in Train Wrecks: A Pictorial History of Accidents on the Main Line, New York, N.Y.: Bonanza Books, Crown Publishing Group, →OCLC, page 55
- Synonyms:
- prairie meet, Mexican standoff
Examples of cornfield meet in a sentence
- Five passengers were killed in this cornfield meet.1968, Robert C[arroll] Reed, “Head-on Collisions”, in Train Wrecks: A Pictorial History of Accidents on the Main Line, New York, N.Y....
- [A] couple of passenger trains staged a cornfield meet in the deep cut on Mount Holly, which the road settled with "gratuities" amounting to $50,000.1997, Jim Shaughnessy, “The Hunted Traps the Hunter”, in The Rutland Road, 2nd edition, Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, →ISBN...
- One hundred years ago, staged railroad accidents were popular events. […] "Head-on Joe" Connolly made a business out of "cornfield meets" holding seventy-three events in thirty-six years.1998, Ian Savage, “Preface”, in The Economics of Railroad Safety (Transportation Research, Economics and Policy; 7), New York, N.Y....
- [An 1899 man discovering ragtime:] [N]ow they're writing music that sounds like a cornfield meet.2007, Eddie Campbell, The Black Diamond Detective Agency: Containing Mayhem, Mystery, Romance, Mine shafts, Bullets, New York, N.Y....
Synonyms of cornfield meet
Forms of cornfield meet
| plural | cornfield meets |
|---|
Origin of cornfield meet
Either from the fact that early train collisions often occurred out in the country alongside a cornfield rather than in a station or siding; or from staged events where two old steam locomotives were purposely run head on at each other, often in an open field, for public entertainment. In the latter idea, the term may jocularly echo field meet as a spectacle in the field involving opposing contestants.
Questions about cornfield meet
- What does cornfield meet mean?
- Cornfield meet means an accidental head-on collision or near head-on collision of two trains.
- How do you use cornfield meet in a sentence?
- Five passengers were killed in this cornfield meet.
- What part of speech is cornfield meet?
- Cornfield meet is a noun.
- How do you pronounce cornfield meet?
- Cornfield meet is pronounced /ˈkɔːnfiːld ˌmiːt/ (UK).
- What is the plural of cornfield meet?
- The plural of cornfield meet is cornfield meets.
Words near cornfield meet in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: cornfield meet (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:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-uk-cornfield meet.ogg, En-us-cornfield meet.ogg, en-au-cornfield meet.ogg.
Cite this entry: “cornfield meet.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cornfield_meet. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.