darbies


Also found in: Wikipedia.
Related to darbies: manacle

darbies

(ˈdɑːbɪz)
pl n
informal old-fashioned Brit handcuffs
[C16: perhaps from the phrase Father Derby's or Father Darby's bonds, a rigid agreement between a usurer and his client]
Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014
Mentioned in ?
References in periodicals archive ?
Guns, The Darbies, Teeze, Dang Blasted Cranks: 7:30 p.m.
In "Billy in the Darbies," for instance, Owens takes a literary ballad from a narrative that should furnish abundant resources for a populist critique of exploitation and instead produces a collage of Melville's language that merely creates the frisson of being caught up in contemporary economic forces: "greasy hogs brood / on the collateral organs of others / muted." This is an earth-shattering sentence with a mixed metaphor that knowingly comments on the people's loss of voice.
took a run at me and knocked me higher than a kite; He slipped the darbies on me, and the Tombs not being far: I bid farewell to Larry and his big five gallon jar.
(43) The Chamberlain's Accounts of the Corporation of Gloucester record payment of ten shillings to 'the Lord Strange his players' in 1591-92, and in 1595-96 thirty shillings were 'geven to the Earle of Darbies plaiers', and twenty shillings to the Lord Admiral's men.
12 Darbies is an old slang word for which part of police equipment?
The crew, the ordinary seamen, speaking as the people, not as a mob, who lend Billy his last word in their ballad "Billy in the Darbies": --But aren't it all a sham?
Longer darbies may require two handles for better control.