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Blackball   /blˈækbˌɔl/   Listen
noun
Blackball  n.  
1.
A composition for blacking shoes, boots, etc.; also, one for taking impressions of engraved work.
2.
A ball of black color, esp. one used as a negative in voting; in this sense usually two words.


verb
Blackball  v. t.  (past & past part. blackballed; pres. part. blackballing)  
1.
To vote against, by putting a black ball into a ballot box; to reject or exclude, as by voting against with black balls; to ostracize. "He was blackballed at two clubs in succession."
2.
To blacken (leather, shoes, etc.) with blacking.





Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48


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"Blackball" Quotes from Famous Books



... way." The Prince of Wales's travels in his nonage have made Telemachus a tortoise, and the young Anacharsis a stay-at-home. Married couples spend their honeymoon hippopotamus hunting in Abyssinia, or exploring the sources of the Nile. And the Traveller's Club are obliged to blackball nine-tenths of the candidates put up for election, because now-a-days almost every tolerably educated Englishman has travelled more than six hundred miles in a straight direction from the ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... now and then a skull and portions of skeleton came down with the rock. The peons had first balked at this, but the superintendent had told them the bones were merely strange shapes of ore, ordered them to break up the skulls and throw them in with the rest, and threatened to discharge and blackball any man who talked ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... easily be imagined that when 'His Majesty' expressed his approval of Richard Brinsley, then a young man of eight-and-twenty, there was no one who ventured to blackball him, and so Sheridan was ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... of distant saint would Pendennis and Colonel Newcome and Mr. Moss and Captain Costigan and Ridley the butler and Bayham and Sir Barnes Newcome and Laura and the Duchess d'Ivry and Warrington and Captain Blackball and Lady Kew travel, ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... (seclusion) 893; noninclusion[obs3], preclusion, prohibition. separation, segregation, seposition[obs3], elimination, expulsion; cofferdam. V. be excluded from &c. exclude, bar; leave out, shut out, bar out; reject, repudiate, blackball; lay apart, put apart, set apart, lay aside, put aside; relegate, segregate; throw overboard; strike off, strike out; neglect &c. 460; banish &c. (seclude) 893; separate.&c. (disjoin) 44. pass over, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus


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