tenpenny nail
1
6.4
- noun
- Specialized
:
clavo de diez
- I don't know what happened to that idea, but here were four faded lifejackets hooked on tenpenny nails.
Examples
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For the men, he had English ax heads, tenpenny nails, hammerheads, and belt buckles - mostly of horn, but one or two special ones of hard iron.
Fiction book (1994) -
The carpenter used a tenpenny nail to secure the wooden beams together.
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To build the frame of the house, they needed several boxes of tenpenny nails.
-
She carefully hammered a tenpenny nail into the wall to hang the picture.
Synonyms
A nail about three inches long that joins thick wooden boards
A 2.5 inch nail used to join pieces of wood
A nail about two inches long used in carpentry
A small metal pin about one and a half inches long that holds pieces of wood together
How Long
Surface Forms
Morphology
The phrase combines the adjectival measure 'tenpenny' (denoting roughly a three-inch size) with the noun 'nail', so the overall meaning 'a three-inch nail' is directly compositional. Measurement + object constructions are common and predictable, so a learner who knows both constituents will understand the MWE.
Etymology
Tenpenny nail comes from an old way of naming nails by price: bigger nails were sold in groups and called by their cost, so people called these larger ones ten penny for 'ten pennies'. Over time that price name became a size name, so today tenpenny nail means 'a nail about 3 inches long' used in carpentry.