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Ringer
Definitions
- 1 A surname.
- 1 Someone who rings, especially a bell ringer.
"Pull, if ye never pull′d before; Good ringers, pull your best," quoth he."
- 2 In the game of horseshoes, the event of the horseshoe landing around the pole.
- 3 A top performer. UK, dialectal
- 4 Any person or thing that is fraudulent; a fake or impostor. slang
- 5 A person, animal, or entity which resembles another so closely as to be taken for the other; a look-alike (now usually in the phrase dead ringer).
"That man over there is an exact ringer for my father!"
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- 6 An officer having the specified number of rings (denoting rank) on the uniform sleeve. UK, in-compounds, informal
"A group of naval one- and two-ringers were chatting by the office door with a few ratings, complete with kit-bags and oilskins."
- 7 A fan of the novel The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien and/or the film trilogy based on it. slang
"Readers flocked online to articulate their angst, discovering 400 websites where "Ringers" congregated to converse in Quenya – one of Tolkien's fictional languages – and discuss such burning issues as whether elves have pointy ears."
- 8 (horseshoes) the successful throw of a horseshoe or quoit so as to encircle a stake or peg wordnet
- 9 A crowbar.
- 10 A game of marbles where players attempt to knock each other's marbles out of a ring drawn on the ground. uncountable
- 11 The champion shearer of a shearing shed. Australia
"Click goes his shears; click, click, click. Wide are the blows, and his hand is moving quick, The ringer looks round, for he lost it by a blow, And he curses that old shearer with the bare belled ewe."
- 12 A person highly proficient at a skill or sport who is brought in, often fraudulently, to supplement a team.
"Near-synonym: hustler"
- 13 a contestant entered in a competition under false pretenses wordnet
- 14 A ringer T-shirt.
"[…] shabby baseball caps, faded and worn-out T-shirts, ringers and polos with artificially aged hems […]"
- 15 A stockman, a cowboy. Australia
"1964, Alec Bolton, Walkabout′s Australia, Walkabout magazine, page 107, The ringers are the stockmen on a station. The cattle pass through their hands before the drovers lift them and take them along the stock routes that lead to the killing pens in cities."
- 16 A horse fraudulently entered in a race using the name of another horse.
- 17 a person who is almost identical to another wordnet
- 18 A fraudulently cloned (or cut-and-shut) motor vehicle. UK, slang
"I had heard early on in my career about 'ringers': cars that were stolen and cloned, but it was 1993 before I was to experience this first-hand."
- 19 a person who rings church bells (as for summoning the congregation) wordnet
Etymology
From Middle English ringere, rynger, ryngar, equivalent to ring (“to sound a bell”) + -er.
From ring (“to surround”) + -er.
Unknown. Probably so named after the custom of ringing a bell to denote the winner of a contest or competition.
Some senses may derive from ring the changes (“run through variations; enliven; pass counterfeit money; trick a shopkeeper into giving too much change”).
Unclear. Compare ring of truth.
From ring + -er, from the noun.
Inherited from Middle English Ryngere, from ryngere (“bell-ringer”).
From ring + -er.
See also for "ringer"
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Unscramble this word: ringer