five-and-dime
Americannoun
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a variety store that sells small, inexpensive items.
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a thing, situation, or practice in which a 5 is followed by a 10, such as a golf hole that is best played with a 5 iron and then a 10 iron, or judging a screenplay based on its first 5 and last 10 pages (often used attributively).
adjective
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relating to or being a variety store that sells small items at low prices.
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inexpensive and of poor quality; cheap or lacking in class and sophistication.
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Newberry’s five-and-dime store, she worked for a month and a half to pay it off in installments, wearing it for years until it all but disintegrated.
From The Wall Street Journal • Nov. 14, 2025
Blevins started working for Walmart in the early 1990s after the five-and-dime he owned with his wife, Teresa, went under, his stepdaughter Cassandra Yeatts told The Associated Press.
From Seattle Times • Nov. 27, 2022
Born in New York on June 6, 1933, Broad was an only child who grew up in Detroit, where his Lithuanian immigrant father, Leon, worked as a house painter before operating several five-and-dime stores.
From Los Angeles Times • Apr. 30, 2021
This was the headquarters for a five-and-dime company that, a century ago, was the symbol of American dynamism and of the emerging middle class when anything seemed possible in the country.
From New York Times • May 6, 2020
The five-and-dime was my very favorite store because it had things we could afford to buy and we always came home with something new in our hands.
From "March Forward, Girl" by Melba Pattillo Beals
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
