dinner-party

English

Noun

dinner-party (plural dinner-parties)

1. Alternative form of dinner party.
   • 1842, [Katherine] Thomson, chapter XIII, in Widows and Widowers. A Romance of Real Life., volume I, London: Richard Bentley, , →OCLC, page 289:

     An attempt at entrées and removes failed at the first dinner-party.

   • 1848 November – 1850 December, William Makepeace Thackeray, chapter 19, in The History of Pendennis. , volumes (please specify |volume=I or II), London: Bradbury and Evans, , published 1849–1850, →OCLC:

     [H]aving a dinner-party at his rooms to entertain some friends from London, nothing would satisfy Mr. Foker but painting Mr. Buck’s door vermilion, in which freak he was caught by the proctors …

   • 1851 February, “A Little Stimulant — A Temperance Tale”, in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, volume 2, number 9, page 363:

     Walter, yet new in his spousedom, was more amenable than an older hand ; but Rosa had no want of anxiety in this her first dinner-party.

   • 1863, J[oseph] Sheridan Le Fanu, The House by the Church-yard. , volumes (please specify |volume=I to III), London: Tinsley, Brothers, , →OCLC:

     'She knows well enough I like her,' so his liking said in confidence to his vanity, and even he hardly overheard them talk; 'better a great deal than I knew it myself, till old Strafford got together this confounded stupid dinner-party (he caught Miss Chattesworth glancing at him with a peculiar look of enquiry). Why the plague did he ask me here? it was Puddock's turn, and he likes venison and compots, […]

   • 1883, R.L. Stevenson, “Napa wine”, in The Silverado Squatters‎, Chatto and Windus, →ISBN, page 35f.:

     If wine is to withdraw its most poetic countenance, the sun of the white dinner-cloth, a deity to be invoked by two or three, all fervent, hushing their talk, degusting tenderly and storing reminiscences &emdash; for a bottle of good wine, like a good act, shines ever in the retrospect — if wine is to desert us, go thy ways, old Jack! Now we begin to have compunctions, and look back at the brave bottles squandered upon dinner-parties, where the guests drank grossly, discussing politics the while, and even the schoolboy "took his whack," like liquorice water.

   • 1887, Harriet W. Daly, Digging, Squatting, and Pioneering Life in the Northern Territory of South Australia, page 79:

     We gave such dinner-parties as our commissariat allowed; the menu was simplicity itself - " blanket " for every course, cunningly disguised as soup, entree, and, I was going to say, joint.

   • 1919, Saki, The Toys of Peace and Other Papers:

     She is only coming to gloat over my bedraggled and flowerless borders and to sing the praises of her own detestably over-cultivated garden. I’m sick of being told that it’s the envy of the neighbourhood; it’s like everything else that belongs to her—her car, her dinner-parties, even her headaches, they are all superlative; no one else ever had anything like them.

   • 1938, Norman Lindsay, Age of Consent, 1st Australian edition, Sydney, N.S.W.: Ure Smith, published 1962, →OCLC, page 167:

     "Oysters and whitebait and a tin of pate, peaches and a pineapple and one of our fowls; well, a woman might like to give herself a nice little dinner once in a while, but not a bottle of wine at four shillings and a three and sixpenny tin of cigarettes, for I never will believe she's took to drink and smoking of a suddent, so own up, Mr. Widgett, it's a little dinner-party on your account."

   • 1966, Eric Walter White, “Part One: The Man”, “10. The Return of the Native (1962)”, in Stravinsky: The Composer and His Works, University of California Press, published 1972, →ISBN, page 124:

     After recording the Dostoievskyan dinner-party at the Metropole Hotel, Moscow, on 1 October and meditating on the effects of Stravinsky’s exile, Craft wrote in his Diary: ‘I am certain that to be recognised and acclaimed as a Russian in Russia, and to be performed there, has meant more to him than anything else in the years I have known him.’