Word.ws English Dictionary

for old time's sake

for old time's sake is the alternative form of for old times' sake.

Meaning of for old times' sake

Prepositional phrase

  1. (idiomatic) An appeal to the nostalgia of prior experiences to convince someone to do something.
    • When gang leader Chen Xinfu was apprehended in Haikou, capital of south China’s island province of Hainan, earlier this month he told his arresting officers: “Guys, take good care of me, for old times’ sake.”
      Unlike the hundreds of other mob bosses who have been rounded up in recent months, Chen...2019 April 14, Guo Rui, “China’s war on organised crime, corrupt officials sees 79,000 people detained”, in South China Morning Post, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 14 Apr 2019, Politics

Questions about for old time's sake

What is for old time's sake the alternative form of?
For old time's sake is the alternative form of for old times' sake.

Words near for old time's sake in the dictionary

  1. for name's sake
  2. for no good reason
  3. for nothing
  4. for now
  5. for old sake's sake
  6. for old time's sake
  7. for old times' sake
  8. for old times' sakes
  9. for once
  10. for once and for all
  11. for one

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: for old time's sake (page history and authors); for old times' sake (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: “for old time's sake.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/for_old_time%27s_sake. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.