cockfight

From cock +‎ fight.

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈkɒkˌfaɪt/

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˈkɑkˌfaɪt/

cockfight (plural cockfights)

1. A contest, in a cockpit, between gamecocks fitted with cockspurs

   Synonym: (archaic) cockmatch

   • 1869, Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, volume I, London: Macmillan and Co., page 278:

     This was a very hard problem; and the Rajah thought and thought, as hard as a Malay Rajah can be expected to think, but could not solve it; and so he was very unhappy, and did nothing but smoke and chew betel with his favourite wife, and eat scarcely anything; and even when he went to the cock-fight did not seem to care whether his best birds won or lost.

cockfight (third-person singular simple present cockfights, present participle cockfighting, simple past and past participle cockfought)

1. To participate in (as a rooster), or organize and run (as a gambler or bookmaker), a cockfighting event.
   • 1994, Charlise Lyles, Do I Dare Disturb the Universe?, page 245:

     I watched through to the triumphant ending, in which Chicken George cockfought his way to freedom and came back with gold to buy his family out of postwar sharecropping.

• cockfighter
• cockfighting

• alectoromachy