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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
ninepins
noun
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Men and horses went down like ninepins before them, in a tangle of waving limbs, flailing hooves and broken lances.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Ninepins

Ninepins \Nine"pins\, n. pl. A game played with nine pins, or pieces of wood, set on end, at which a wooden ball is bowled to knock them down; bowling.

Note: In the United States, ten pins are used for this game, which is therefore often called tenpins.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
ninepins

1570s, from nine + plural of pin (n.). From the number of pins to be knocked down.

Wiktionary
ninepins

n. 1 (plural of ninepin English) 2 The game of skittles

WordNet
ninepins

n. bowling down an alley at a target of nine wooden pins [syn: skittles]

Usage examples of "ninepins".

She would be scrabbling for safety atop his shell, while he burst from the cabin, scattering Takisians like ninepins, rescued Tach, and flew them triumphantly home.

The arrest of Marie Bosse was like knocking down the first of a row of ninepins, but none could have suspected that the last of these stood in the royal apartments.

Men were hurled aside like ninepins by the impact of some moving body that clove them like the rush of a tornado.

A second rock shattered the glorious towers like ninepins, toppling them left and right.

Plunging into the fray with a curse, he exercised his great strength, throwing the men this way and that like ninepins, and finally dragging Silas to his feet again.

In the inn-yard there was no sign of a soul, except the village idiot who was playing ninepins with bottles.

The nicely paraded company went down like ninepins and within a short space of time all the Russian tanks were ablaze.

I have legs like ninepins and I can dance, so just follow and do as I say.

His mind had assessed the people he met in New York, but they might have been ninepins for all he cared about them, though for Felicity he had felt a certain dim tenderness.

Cold, spectral blue bolts of sky fire, followed by distant reverberant thunder, as if somebody were playing ninepins with asteroids for balls and dry, forlorn planets for pins.

Shal held the Staff of Power out at just the right height to clip the tall gnolls in the neck as they approached, sending them to the ground like so many ninepins.

With the enthusiastic egotism of the true artist he went over his most celebrated performances, and smiled bitterly to himself as he recalled to mind his last appearance as "Red Ruben, or the Strangled Babe," his début as "Gaunt Gibeon, the Blood-sucker of Bexley Moor," and the furore he had excited one lonely June evening by merely playing ninepins with his own bones upon the lawn-tennis ground.

The recoil cable had burnt through minutes before, and the kick of the piece sent it and its burning carriage down the incline of packed earth and log-corduroy, much to the pain and suffering of a bucket line through which it suddenly burst, hurling men hither and yon like so many ninepins.