fruit machine
- noun
- /fruːt məˈʃiːn/
- UK
:
tragaperras
- In the corner of the pub, I watched a group of friends gather around a fruit machine hoping to win some money.
Examples
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He dropped a few coins into the fruit machine and pulled the lever excitedly, hoping for a jackpot.
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On a normal fruit machine #
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Yeah because they thought it was a big fruit machine.
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This is where I like to play with my fruit machines.
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Tom and Nick are stuck away in a corner playing on a fruit machine. NICK: Weed? TOM:
Fiction book (1998) -
A Fruit Machine for Gambling
Blog text (27) -
(pulls handle of fruit machine)
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They called to her on her way back from the Ladies, stopping her in her tracks as she passed the fruit machine.
Fiction book (1995) -
♪ Find a piece of silver ♪ ♪ Pretty as a diagram ♪ ♪ Go down to the Rio ♪ ♪ Put it in my left hand ♪ ♪ Put it in a fruit machine ♪ ♪ Everyone's a winner ♪ ♪ Laughin' like a seagull ♪
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After dinner, we decided to try our luck at the fruit machine before heading home.
Synonyms
25
3.3
A machine in a casino where you put coins and spin pictures to try to win money
Surface Forms
Morphology
The phrase clearly combines 'fruit' and 'machine', so a learner can guess it refers to a machine associated with fruit, but the conventional British meaning — a coin-operated gambling/slot machine displaying fruit symbols — is a culturally specific, non-obvious sense not fully predictable from the parts. Because the core idea (machine with fruit imagery) is partly derivable but the gambling/slot meaning requires prior exposure, the expression is best classified as semi-transparent.
Etymology
The phrase fruit machine comes from early gambling machines that had pictures of fruit like cherries, lemons and oranges on their spinning reels. Because people saw the fruit on the machine, they began to call the whole thing a fruit machine, and today the name means 'a coin-operated gambling machine'.