• Two-up

    Origin

    From two + up.

    Alternative forms

    Full definition of two-up

    Noun

    two-up

    (uncountable)
    1. (Australia, New Zealand, games) A game of chance, played by betting on the outcome of two pennies thrown in the air.
      • 1993, Ernest Hunter, Aboriginal Health and History: Power and Prejudice in Remote Australia, page 242,From the image of a wily digger playing two-up, to a prime minister at the track or the tables, the construction of gambling is as an activity quintessentially Australian.
      • 1994, David Malcolm Grant, On a Roll: A History of Gambling and Lotteries in New Zealand, page 66,The origins of two-up remain obscure. It probably derived from ‘pitch and toss’, a game British youths had played since the late eighteenth century. In Australia pitch and toss was first recorded in the 1850s on the Victorian goldfields, and in New Zealand as a street game on the West Coast in the early 1870s. Two-up evolved as a variant, becoming popular in Australia in the early 1890s, and in New Zealand a year or two later, as labouring men from both countries traversed the Tasman Sea in search of work.
      • 2008, Sam De Brito, The Lost Boys, page 280,Perversely, Scorps chooses not to punt on Anzac Day and won′t go near two-up, probably because his losses will be too public.

    Synonyms

    US, swy, swy-up

    Adjective

    two-up

    1. (of a printed document) Having two document pages per printed page.

    Adverb

    two-up

    1. (manner, of travel on a motorcycle) With two people aboard.''Some of us rode two-up as we travelled in convoy to the beach.
    © Wiktionary