blackball
English
Etymology
Pronunciation
Noun
blackball (countable and uncountable, plural blackballs)
- (countable) A rejection; a vote against admitting someone.
- (countable) A black ball used to indicate such a negative vote.
- Regardless how many other people may have voted to approve a candidate for membership, a single blackball will reject the candidate.
- (countable) A kind of large black sweet; a niggerball.
- A substance for blacking shoes, boots, etc. or for taking impressions of engraved work.
- (uncountable) A game, a standardized version of the English version of eight-ball.
- Synonym: reds and yellows
Verb
blackball (third-person singular simple present blackballs, present participle blackballing, simple past and past participle blackballed)
- (transitive) To vote against, especially in an exclusive organization.
- If you're not from a moneyed, well-connected family, you can count on getting blackballed from the fraternity.
- 1898, Willa Cather, The Westbound Train:
- Why, if I had known you all my life I should have grown up in the condition of Adam before the fall, and they would have blackballed me at the clubs.
- (transitive) To ostracize.
- Synonyms: blacklist, send to Coventry; see also Thesaurus:ignore, Thesaurus:boycott
- 1968 July, Stan Dryer, “The Fully Automated Love Life of Henry Keanridge”, in Playboy Magazine, page 152:
- Henry knew. If he were blackballed by this distaff Mafia, he was doomed: Endless, but always justifiable, delays would occur in the work he wanted typed.