Word.ws English Dictionary

punch cards

punch cards is the plural of punch card.

Meaning of punch card

Noun

punch card (plural punch cards)

  1. A card that can have holes or notches cut in it, especially one for storing data, that can be sorted according to combinations of holes present or absent.
    1. (historical) Such a card, the size of a US dollar bill and having 80 columns of 12 rows, used in early mainframe computers.
      • Programming by typing C++ or Python yourself might eventually seem as ridiculous as issuing instructions in binary onto a punch card.2023 November 13, James Somers, “A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft”, in The New Yorker, →ISSN
  2. A card given to a customer and punched with a hole at each purchase, allowing a reward to be claimed when fully punched.

Questions about punch cards

What is punch cards the plural of?
Punch cards is the plural of punch card.

Words near punch cards in the dictionary

  1. punch bowl waterfall
  2. punch bowl waterfalls
  3. punch bowls
  4. punch buggy
  5. punch card
  6. punch cards
  7. punch clock
  8. punch clocks
  9. punch dagger
  10. punch daggers
  11. punch dialogue

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: punch cards (page history and authors); punch card (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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