Word.ws English Dictionary

four-half

four-half noun: a drink of half ale, half porter, originally costing fourpence a quart.

Noun

four-half (uncountable)

  1. (historical, slang) A drink of half ale, half porter, originally costing fourpence a quart.
    • At nine o'clock that night Darkey was still consuming four-half, and relating certain adventures by sea which, he averred, had happened to himself.1893, Arnold Bennett, A Letter Home
    • [H]e regarded the whole world as her grave, and the tipsy sergeants in scarlet, the carter crying for a pint of four-half, and even the horses dipping their mild noses to the trough in the courtyard seemed to be defiling it by their happy, simple appetites.1918 March, Rebecca West [pseudonym; Cicily Isabel Fairfield], chapter IV, in The Return of the Soldier, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., published 1918, →OCLC, pages 96–97

Questions about four-half

What does four-half mean?
Four-half means a drink of half ale, half porter, originally costing fourpence a quart.
What part of speech is four-half?
Four-half is a noun.

Words near four-half in the dictionary

  1. four-footed
  2. four-force
  3. four-four time
  4. Four-H Club
  5. Four-H Clubs
  6. four-half
  7. four-handed
  8. four-handedly
  9. four-handedness
  10. four-hankie
  11. four-hundredth

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: four-half (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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