Word.ws English Dictionary

fantan

fantan is the alternative form of fan-tan.

Meaning of fan-tan

Noun

fan-tan (uncountable)

  1. 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
  2. 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.

Questions about fantan

What is fantan the alternative form of?
Fantan is the alternative form of fan-tan.

Words near fantan in the dictionary

  1. fantagonism
  2. fantail
  3. fantailed
  4. fantails
  5. Fantaing
  6. fantan
  7. fantard
  8. fantards
  9. Fantas
  10. fantascience
  11. fantaserye

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: fantan (page history and authors); fan-tan (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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Cite this entry: “fantan.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/fantan. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.