Word.ws English Dictionary

cups-and-balls

cups-and-balls is the plural of cup-and-ball.

Meaning of cup-and-ball

Noun

cup-and-ball (plural cup-and-balls or cups-and-balls)

  1. A traditional children's toy consisting of a hand-held wooden cup with a ball attached by a string. The player jerks the ball into the air and attempts to catch it in the cup.
    • When I was at Motiers, I used to employ myself in making laces with my neighbors, and were I again to mix with the world, I would always carry a cup-and-ball in my pocket; I should sometimes play with it the whole day, that I might not be constrained to speak when I had nothing to discourse about...1782, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, translated by Samuel William Orson, The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Book V, published 1903
    Synonyms:
    bilboquet

Questions about cups-and-balls

What is cups-and-balls the plural of?
Cups-and-balls is the plural of cup-and-ball.

Words near cups-and-balls in the dictionary

  1. cups o' joe
  2. cups of coffee
  3. cups of joe
  4. cups of tea
  5. cups that cheer
  6. cups-and-balls
  7. cupseed
  8. cupseeds
  9. cupset
  10. cupsets
  11. cupsful

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cups-and-balls (page history and authors); cup-and-ball (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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