yarbles
/ˈjɑː(ɹ)bəlz/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 0.00 in modern English
12
Scrabble Score
7
Letters
1
Syllables
7
Unique Chars
Meaning
Example Sentences
- ""Come and get one in the yarbles, if you have any yarbles, you eunuch jelly, thou.""
- "I mean, who could ever forget the touching moment in [The] Monster Squad when a pre-teenager kicks the Wolfman in the nuts and utters the classic line "The Wolfman has yarbles!""
- ""I'm not worried. This kid's got giant yarbles." "Giant yarbles make bigger targets," I say. "Maybe he ought to wear more than a loincloth." Ockham laughs. Slaps me on the back. "Didn't know you had a sense of humor, chief.""
- "Well, my droogs, this is a load of yarbles. Right now at New World Stages, a risible British adaptation of A Clockwork Orange is doing a bit of the old ultraviolence to its audience."
- "James Brown looked a tool on C4's Withnail Weekend. Brown's crew at Loaded was credited with inventing the Withnail drinking game "I Demand to Have Some Booze". Utter yarbles. Fact: the game, where viewers simultaneously enjoy beverages identical to those consumed by characters on screen, was introduced by a journalist on the Evening Standard's London Life section in the mid-1980s."
- ""God knows, does He?" grinned Andy, unfazed. "Why hasn't He struck me dead then, kiddo?" Chris looked at him. "Just because He hasn't yet doesn't mean He won't. I hope I'm not standing next to you when it happens, that's all." "Yarbles!""
Etymology
Yarbles was coined by Anthony Burgess in 1962, when he introduced it as slang for "testicles" within the invented dialect Nadsat of his dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange. The word is generally understood to be a derivation from Russian яблоко (jabloko, “apple”), owing to the variant form "yarblockos" used within the same novel. Jabloko does not have the equivalent vulgar connotation among Russian speakers, although яйца (jajca, literally “eggs”) does, which may have influenced the word. Green's Dictionary of Slang posits an possible alternate origin as yarb + balls: a combination of the antiquated, sometimes-derogatory English dialect word "yarb" with the vulgar colloquialism "balls". Others have suggested a connection to marbles via the methods of English rhyming slang.
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: яблоко