Word.ws English Dictionary

rattle the bones

rattle the bones verb: to play dice.

rattle the bones: to play dice
Image: Traitor, original by Chris 73, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Verb

rattle the bones (third-person singular simple present rattles the bones, present participle rattling the bones, simple past and past participle rattled the bones)

  1. (obsolete, slang) To play dice.
    • Little Mr. Crow shook the dice up and down in his balled hands so long that the Butcher growled "Come on! Come on! Get done, man!" He continued to rattle the bones between his palms, and the Butchers red face twisted up into a scowl.1902 March, John Oxenham, “The Legion of the Lost”, in Macmillan's Magazine, volume 85, number 509, pages 386–87

Forms of rattle the bones

third-person singular presentrattles the bones
present participlerattling the bones
past participlerattled the bones
pastrattled the bones

Questions about rattle the bones

What does rattle the bones mean?
Rattle the bones means to play dice.
What part of speech is rattle the bones?
Rattle the bones is a verb.
What is the past tense of rattle the bones?
The past tense of rattle the bones is rattled the bones.

Words near rattle the bones in the dictionary

  1. rattle snakes
  2. rattle someone's cage
  3. rattle someone's chain
  4. rattle stone
  5. rattle stones
  6. rattle the bones
  7. rattle the saber
  8. rattle the sabre
  9. rattle through
  10. rattle trap
  11. rattle traps

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: rattle the bones (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-rattle the bones.ogg.

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