Sam Spade
Sam Spade proper noun: the fictional private detective created by Dashiell Hammett who was protagonist of The Maltese Falcon.
Proper noun
Sam Spade
- The fictional private detective created by Dashiell Hammett who was protagonist of The Maltese Falcon.
Noun
Sam Spade (plural Sam Spades)
- A private detective.
- Congratulations on the detective work — a real Sam Spade job.1970, Edmund Fuller, Flight, page 98
- "To do a real Sam Spade, phone a bar near the resort. The ski bum who answers the phone will tell it as he sees it1977, “Psst... Wanna Find Some Snow”, in Ski, number October
Examples of Sam Spade in a sentence
- Next we tried amateurs, two college students out to make their fortune as modern-day Sam Spades.2006, Betsy Burton, The King's English: Adventures of an Independent Bookseller, page 64:
- I reckon like I'm some kind of Sam Spade here.2018, Steve Wilson, chapter 8, in Spoilt for Choice:
Forms of Sam Spade
| plural | Sam Spades |
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Questions about Sam Spade
- What does Sam Spade mean?
- Sam Spade means the fictional private detective created by Dashiell Hammett who was protagonist of The Maltese Falcon.
- How do you use Sam Spade in a sentence?
- Next we tried amateurs, two college students out to make their fortune as modern-day Sam Spades.
- What part of speech is Sam Spade?
- Sam Spade can be a proper noun or a noun.
Words near Sam Spade in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: Sam Spade (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.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “Sam Spade.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sam_spade. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.