penny arcade
1
7.0
- noun
- /ˈpɛni ɑrˈkeɪd/
- Archaic
:
salón de juegos
- When performing telesurgery, the surgeon sits comfortably at the Intuitive console, head tilted forward and eyes peering down, like a child viewing a stereoscopic movie in a penny arcade.
Examples
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- I had Moose meet me at a penny arcade outside the hotel, then we went to meet Georgie, who I'd phoned to get us a boat.
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Her graffiti-scrawled building was a stone's throw away from the freezing winds of the boardwalk, where there were boarded-up factories, hot dog stands, and a few penny arcades that stayed open off season.
Fiction book (2000) -
As I walked round and round the penny arcade.
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It's a melody played in a penny arcade
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She won it in a penny arcade in Baltimore... ...when she went to Catholic school.
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During that time, the motion picture has grown from a penny arcade concession to the world's major entertainment.
Academic text (2017) -
You expect me to draw fire, like one of those penny arcade bears that parades back and forth, waiting for somebody, somebody very good, just to take another shot.
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In a cathedral, a ballpark or a penny arcade, we want you two beside us, as our nearest and dearest friends.
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We spent the afternoon playing games at the penny arcade by the pier.
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In the bustling penny arcade, the sounds of laughter and the clinking of coins filled the air.
Synonyms
1
2.6
A place with game machines you play for fun, like video games and pinball
Surface Forms
Morphology
The phrase is compositionally transparent: 'penny' specifies the coin/cost and 'arcade' denotes a covered passage or place with amusements/shops, so a learner who knows both words can infer an arcade with penny-operated games. Though somewhat historical/region-specific, the modifier+head logic makes the meaning directly derivable from the constituents for a B1 learner.
Etymology
The phrase penny arcade comes from early game places where you put a penny into a machine to make it play, and an arcade was a row of these coin machines. So, the name stuck and now means 'a place with coin-operated machines and games'.