fan-tan
fan-tan noun: a Chinese gambling game in which coins or other small objects are placed upon a table, usually under a cup, and the players bet as to what remainder will be left when the sum of the counters is divided by four.
Noun
fan-tan (uncountable)
- A Chinese gambling game in which coins or other small objects are placed upon a table, usually under a cup, and the players bet as to what remainder will be left when the sum of the counters is divided by four.
- He came in an said Pack, we were booked for Macau. When we got there, I played fantan in the Lisboa and he crossed over into Zhongshan.1984, William Gibson, Neuromancer (Sprawl; book 1), New York, N.Y.: Ace Books, →ISBN, page 85
- A card game in which the cards are played in sequences upon the table, and the winner is the first player to have no cards left.
fan-tan meaning in Tamil, Tagalog and Thai
fan-tan in Tamil
- சீட்டுச் சூதாட்டம்
fan-tan in Tagalog
- a specific gambling game where objects are counted in sets of four
- capona
fan-tan in Thai
- a specific gambling game where objects are counted in sets of four
- เล่นถั่ว len thua, กำถั่ว kam thua, ถั่ว thua
Forms of fan-tan
| alternative form | fantan |
|---|
Origin of fan-tan
Borrowed from Cantonese 番攤 /番摊 (faan¹ taan¹, literally “repeated divisions”).
Questions about fan-tan
- What does fan-tan mean?
- Fan-tan means a Chinese gambling game in which coins or other small objects are placed upon a table, usually under a cup, and the players bet as to what remainder will be left when the sum of the counters is divided by four.
- What is fan-tan in Tamil?
- Fan-tan in Tamil is சீட்டுச் சூதாட்டம். See Fan-tan meaning in Tamil.
- What part of speech is fan-tan?
- Fan-tan is a noun.
Words near fan-tan in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: fan-tan (page history and authors); fan-tan (Tamil Wiktionary) (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: “fan-tan.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/fan-tan. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.