Word.ws English Dictionary

fairbank

fairbank verb: for the bank or dealer to assist (the player) by cheating in his/her favour, to encourage further play and facilitate a later swindle.

Verb

fairbank (third-person singular simple present fairbanks, present participle fairbanking, simple past and past participle fairbanked)

  1. (slang, transitive) For the bank or dealer to assist (the player) by cheating in his/her favour, to encourage further play and facilitate a later swindle.
    • I keep on fairbanking the chump until he is between a poop and a sweat. The score is half a C and he's broke.1935, Henry Louis Mencken, George Jean Nathan, The American Mercury, volume 35, page 227
    • I didn't check the dart board for the winner's precise total and will assume he hadn't been “fairbanked.” The guy didn't look like a professional, so I attributed his success to the lean and lady luck.2009, Richard Margittay, Carnival Games: the Perfect Crimes, page 279

Proper noun capitalized: Fairbank

Fairbank (countable and uncountable, plural Fairbanks)

  1. A habitational surname.
  2. A small city in Buchanan County and Fayette County, Iowa, United States.
  3. A ghost town in Cochise County, Arizona, United States.
  4. A township in Buchanan County, Iowa, United States.
  5. An island of Chippewa County, Michigan, United States; in full, Fairbank Island.
  6. A neighborhood of Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
  7. A lake in the city of Greater Sudbury, in northern Ontario, Canada.
  8. An island in Fairbank Lake, in northern Ontario.
  9. A locality in South Gippsland Shire, south eastern Victoria, Australia.
  10. An asteroid in the Solar System; in full, 67235 Fairbank.
    Synonyms:
    Asteroid 67235

Synonyms of fairbank

  • Asteroid 67235

Forms of fairbank

Verb
third-person singular presentfairbanks
present participlefairbanking
past participlefairbanked
pastfairbanked
Proper noun
pluralFairbanks
alternative formFairbanks

Origin of fairbank

From fair + bank.

Questions about fairbank

What does fairbank mean?
Fairbank means for the bank or dealer to assist (the player) by cheating in his/her favour, to encourage further play and facilitate a later swindle.
What part of speech is fairbank?
Fairbank can be a verb or a proper noun.
What is the past tense of fairbank?
The past tense of fairbank is fairbanked.

Words near fairbank in the dictionary

  1. fair-weather friendships
  2. Fairall
  3. Fairalls
  4. Fairbairn
  5. Fairbairns
  6. fairbank
  7. fairbanked
  8. fairbanking
  9. fairbankite
  10. fairbanks
  11. Fairbanks North Star Borough

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: fairbank (page history and authors); Fairbank (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: “fairbank.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/fairbank. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.