Word.ws English Dictionary

fair shake

fair shake noun: reasonable, unbiased treatment; a fair deal.

Noun

fair shake (plural fair shakes)

  1. (idiomatic) Reasonable, unbiased treatment; a fair deal.
    • Raymond J. Williams, the board's executive secretary, told a reporter, "We tried to give the guy [Arnold] a fair shake."1973 November 20, “Army Rejects Plea To Erase 2 Charges On Benedict Arnold”, in New York Times, retrieved 24 May 2017
    • "America is not ideologically racist. Americans are willing to give people a fair shake."1980 April 14, David Aikman, “In Seattle: Up from Revolution”, in Time, retrieved 24 May 2017

Examples of fair shake in a sentence

  • The average citizen in the republic wants to go to bed at night and feel that Catholics in Northern Ireland are receiving a fair shake.2009 July 16, Christopher McGimpsey, “The absurd quest for a united Ireland”, in Guardian, UK, retrieved 24 May 2017:
  • A vast network of fathers’ groups, labour lawyers, bloggers and social advocates rallied to his cause, forcing a national conversation about whether caregiving fathers were getting a fair shake.2015 May 11, Charlie Gillis, “Inside the daddy wars”, in Maclean's Magazine, Canada, retrieved 24 May 2017:
  • “You feel like you’re the underdog and you don’t get a fair shake, so you look for people that are going to shake it up,” she said of the local support for Mr.2022 October 23, Michael H. Keller, David D. Kirkpatrick, “Their America Is Vanishing. Like Trump, They Insist They Were Cheated.”, in The...

Synonyms of fair shake

All synonyms of fair shake

Forms of fair shake

pluralfair shakes

Questions about fair shake

What does fair shake mean?
Fair shake means reasonable, unbiased treatment; a fair deal.
How do you use fair shake in a sentence?
The average citizen in the republic wants to go to bed at night and feel that Catholics in Northern Ireland are receiving a fair shake.
What part of speech is fair shake?
Fair shake is a noun.
What is the plural of fair shake?
The plural of fair shake is fair shakes.

Words near fair shake in the dictionary

  1. fair off
  2. fair pennies
  3. fair penny
  4. fair play
  5. fair sex
  6. fair shake
  7. fair shake of the sauce bottle
  8. fair shakes
  9. fair share
  10. fair suck of the pineapple
  11. fair suck of the sauce bottle

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: fair shake (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-fair shake.ogg.

Cite this entry: “fair shake.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/fair_shake. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.