pocket billiards
- noun
- /ˈpɑkɪt ˈbɪljərdz/
:
billar
- At the community center, there are tables set up for pocket billiards games every Friday night.
- game of pocket billiards
Examples
-
That would have been my first novel: acute descriptions and wild dialogue between street toughs, hard metaphors and cushion shots over a game of pocket billiards, but the manuscript was burned several years later in Minnesota.
Fiction book (1990) -
Or you might think of it as the break in a game of pocket billiards—in three dimensions with the balls ranging up to the size of mountains.
Fiction book (1998) -
On weekends, my friends and I often play pocket billiards at the local bar.
-
He spent the afternoon practicing his shots in a game of pocket billiards with his brother.
Synonyms
163
2.6
A game on a table with pockets where players hit balls with cues
15
4.4
Games played on a table with a cloth top where players use a long stick to hit balls
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning 'games of billiards played on a table with pockets' is directly and transparently composed from 'pocket' (an opening on the table) + 'billiards' (ball-striking table games). This is a straightforward noun-noun compound following an obvious English composition pattern, so a B1 learner who knows both constituents should be able to infer the MWE meaning.
Etymology
Pocket billiards gets its name from the phrase's two parts: pocket for the small holes around the table and billiards for the cue games played with a stick. So it means games like eight-ball or nine-ball where you try to sink balls into the table 'pockets'.