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yellowback

[ yel-oh-bak ]

noun

  1. (formerly) an inexpensive, often lurid, novel bound in yellow cloth or paper.
  2. a gold certificate.


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Word History and Origins

Origin of yellowback1

First recorded in 1790–1800; yellow + back 1
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Example Sentences

Why, he'd give this one or that one a yellowback to buy a new hat, say,—and then the others would tease for new hats.

Tyler Spotswood, in his early 405, can still sourly remember the Washington childhood he spent "in a yellowback walk-up apartmenthouse off a stagnant tree-choked street, with a preachy bookish father who was always broke and a sweet mother with trailing sleeves and a goody-goody kid brother who was a hopeless sap."

Malaeska; The Indian Wife of the White Hunter came out in the yellowback that was to become the trademark of infamy to U.S. parents.

Say, he looks at that yellowback as longin' as an East Side kid sizin' up a fruit cart.

Having first taken one twenty dollar yellowback from the well-padded book, he slipped it and the cigarcase into the inner coat pocket of the dead man.

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