Search

[puhnt] /pʌnt/

noun
1.
Football. a kick in which the ball is dropped and then kicked before it touches the ground.
Compare , .
2.
a small, shallow boat having a flat bottom and square ends, usually used for short outings on rivers or lakes and propelled by poling.
verb (used with object)
3.
Football. to kick (a dropped ball) before it touches the ground.
4.
to propel (a small boat) by thrusting against the bottom of a lake or stream, especially with a pole.
5.
to convey in or as if in a punt.
verb (used without object)
6.
to punt a football.
7.
to propel a boat by thrusting a pole against the bottom of a river, stream, or lake.
8.
to travel or have an outing in a punt.
9.
Informal. to equivocate or delay:
If they ask you for exact sales figures, you’ll have to punt.
[puhnt] /pʌnt/
verb (used without object)
1.
Cards. to lay a stake against the bank, as at faro.
2.
Slang. to gamble, especially to bet on horse races or other sporting events.
noun
3.
Cards. a person who lays a stake against the bank.
[poo nt, puhnt] /pʊnt, pʌnt/
noun
1.
a monetary unit of the Republic of Ireland until the was adopted, equal to 100 pence; Irish pound.
[poo nt] /pʊnt/
noun
1.
an ancient Egyptian name of an area not absolutely identified but believed to be Somaliland.
/pʌnt/
noun
1.
an open flat-bottomed boat with square ends, propelled by a pole See quant1
verb
2.
to propel (a boat, esp a punt) by pushing with a pole on the bottom of a river, etc
/pʌnt/
noun
1.
a kick in certain sports, such as rugby, in which the ball is released and kicked before it hits the ground
2.
any long high kick
verb
3.
to kick (a ball, etc) using a punt
/pʌnt/
verb
1.
(intransitive) to gamble; bet
noun
2.
a gamble or bet, esp against the bank, as in roulette, or on horses
3.
Also called punter. a person who bets
4.
(Austral & NZ, informal) take a punt at, to have an attempt or try at (something)
/pʊnt/
noun
1.
(formerly) the Irish pound
n.

“kick,” 1845; see punt (v.).

“flat-bottomed river boat,” late Old English punt, perhaps an ancient survival of British Latin ponto “flat-bottomed boat” (see OED), a kind of Gallic transport (Caesar), also “floating bridge” (Gellius), from Latin pontem (nominative pons) “bridge” (see pontoon). Or from or influenced by Old French cognate pont “large, flat boat.”
v.

“to kick a ball dropped from the hands before it hits the ground,” 1845, first in a Rugby list of football rules, perhaps from dialectal punt “to push, strike,” alteration of Midlands dialect bunt “to push, butt with the head,” of unknown origin, perhaps echoic. Student slang meaning “give up, drop a course so as not to fail,” 1970s, is because a U.S. football team punts when it cannot advance the ball. Related: Punted; punting.

verb

To gamble; bet

[1706+; fr French ponte, Spanish punta, ”point,” used for playing against the banker in faro and other games]

noun

verb

To shoot: He potted a woodchuck (1860+)

Related Terms

go to pot, not have a pot to piss in, rumpot, sexpot, a shitload, tinpot

[all senses fr cooking pot, as something containing a pot-luck mess of food, something sooty and unattractive, something fat-looking, something to be filled by hitting the hunt’s prey, etc]

(From the punch line of an old joke referring to American football: “Drop back 15 yards and punt!”) 1. To give up, typically without any intention of retrying. “Let’s punt the movie tonight.” “I was going to hack all night to get this feature in, but I decided to punt” may mean that you’ve decided not to stay up all night, and may also mean you’re not ever even going to put in the feature.
2. More specifically, to give up on figuring out what the Right Thing is and resort to an inefficient hack.
3. A design decision to defer solving a problem, typically because one cannot define what is desirable sufficiently well to frame an algorithmic solution. “No way to know what the right form to dump the graph in is – we’ll punt that for now.”
4. To hand a tricky implementation problem off to some other section of the design. “It’s too hard to get the compiler to do that; let’s punt to the run-time system.”
[Jargon File]