casino
Americannoun
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casinos
plural
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a building or large room used for meetings, entertainment, dancing, etc., especially such a place equipped with gambling devices, gambling tables, etc.
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(in Italy) a small country house or lodge.
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Cards. Also cassino a game in which cards that are face up on the table are taken with eligible cards in the hand.
noun
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a public building or room in which gaming takes place, esp roulette and card games such as baccarat and chemin de fer
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a variant spelling of cassino
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of casino
1780–90; < Italian, equivalent to cas(a) “house” + -ino diminutive suffix
Explanation
A casino is a building where people can gamble and play games of chance. Your grandmother might enjoy taking weekend bus trips to the nearest casino with her friends. Many casinos are near — or inside — hotels, and include opportunities to dine, drink, and shop. The main event at a casino, however, is the chance to gamble either by betting money on games like blackjack or poker, or by putting coins in a slot machine. Casino is also the name of a card game. The word comes from the Italian casa, or "house." In the 1800s casino came to mean "building for aristocratic gambling."
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.
See Examples For:
Investors have focused on Hock Tan’s comments at the DBS Asia Future Forward Conference, as reported by Bloomberg, that artificial-intelligence investors are like casino gamblers.
From MarketWatch ● Oct. 13, 2026
This spring, however, the casino offered an even stranger spectacle when a Bitcoin convention filled the expo hall.
From Slate ● Sep. 20, 2026
Mr. Bessent has tried to warn investors off bearish bets on the yen, declaring “I am the house” that always wins in the casino.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 18, 2026
The streamer brought in Koppelman and Levien, and the pair pitched a present-day casino story.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 11, 2026
The casino had misjudged, badly, the odds of its own game, and at least one person had noticed.
From "The Big Short" by Michael Lewis
Zvernec residents say the hotels, casinos and a water park are being developed on land that was stolen from them.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 6, 2026
There were the frozen steaks, the fraudulent university, the ill-fated airline shuttle, the bankrupt Atlantic City casinos and a short-lived dating show spun off from “The Apprentice” that was canceled after two seasons.
From Salon ● Sep. 24, 2026
It also demonstrates how the Labubu craze — in which people keep buying blind boxes of the same toys in hopes of getting a rare, expensive one — has turned some shops into casinos.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 4, 2026
The hunt for AI-proof assets is leading investors to sports, casinos and travel.
From MarketWatch ● Sep. 3, 2026
Tire peace dividend changed the region once again, and now it is best known for the great gambling casinos of Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods and for the pharmaceutical researchers of Pfizer.
From "The World Is Flat" by Thomas L. Friedman
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.
