Word.ws English Dictionary

pencil fever

pencil fever noun: the situation where punters discover that a horse is almost certain to lose, and so become eager to lay bets against it.

Noun

pencil fever (uncountable)

  1. (obsolete, slang) The situation where punters discover that a horse is almost certain to lose, and so become eager to lay bets against it.

Origin of pencil fever

Compare penciler (“a bookmaker”).

Questions about pencil fever

What does pencil fever mean?
Pencil fever means the situation where punters discover that a horse is almost certain to lose, and so become eager to lay bets against it.
What part of speech is pencil fever?
Pencil fever is a noun.

Words near pencil fever in the dictionary

  1. pencil cricket
  2. pencil detonator
  3. pencil detonators
  4. pencil dick
  5. pencil dicks
  6. pencil fever
  7. pencil fish
  8. pencil fishes
  9. pencil flower
  10. pencil flowers
  11. pencil geek

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pencil fever (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: “pencil fever.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pencil_fever. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.