rule-of-three

On this particular morning I was working with energy at a rule-of-three sum, being engaged in a sort of exciting race with the clock, of which the result was still doubtful.

The Story of the White-Rock Cove Anonymous

For this reason other advocates of list systems prefer the simple rule-of-three or

Proportional Representation A Study in Methods of Election John H. Humphreys

And I was by no means one to puzzle it out, as I would a sum in the rule-of-three.

The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 79, May, 1864 Various

And if this is the rule for Euclid and rule-of-three and all the things you would rather not do, think how much more it must be the rule when what you are after is your own idea and not just the rotten notion of that beast Euclid, or the unknown but equally unnecessary author who composed the multiplication table.

New Treasure Seekers Edith 1925

The picture of this swarming concentrated humanity has some effective possibilities, but, unhappily, if, instead of that obvious rule-of-three sum, one resorts to an analysis of operating causes, its plausibility crumbles away, and it gives place to an altogether different forecast -- a forecast, indeed, that is in almost violent contrast to the first anticipation.

Anticipations Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human life and Thought 1906

At the outset he took for granted -- and, very naturally, he wishes to imagine that a great number of other people do also take for granted -- that the future of London, for example, is largely to be got as the answer to a sort of rule-of-three sum.

Anticipations Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human life and Thought 1906

You work out your answers as if he were a sum in rule-of-three: 'If man in so many thousands of years has done so much in such a direction at this or that rate of speed, what will he be doing --?' and so on.

Tea-Table Talk 1893

And if this is the rule for Euclid and rule-of-three and all the things you would rather not do, think how much more it must be the rule when what you are after is your own idea, and not just the rotten notion of that beast Euclid, or the unknown but equally unnecessary author who composed the multiplication table.

New Treasure Seekers or, The Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune 1891

Presently she touched Kate softly, and there on the margin of the clean new book was exhibited the drawing of a dismembered head, glaring horribly over rule-of-three problems, and labelled "Clara" in largest round hand.

Pixie O'Shaughnessy George de Horne Vaizey 1887

The winds of this uncertain season were snarling in the chimneys, and drops of rain spat themselves into the fire, revealing plainly that the young man's room was not far enough from the top of the house to admit of a twist in the flue, and revealing darkly a little more, if that social rule-of-three inverse, the higher in lodgings the lower in pocket, were applicable here.

The Hand of Ethelberta Thomas Hardy 1884