Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun plural Money; cash.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun slang, UK Money.

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Perhaps from obsolete slang spondylics, coins piled for counting, probably from Greek spondulos, vertebra, in humorous reference to the resemblance between a stack of coins and the vertebral column.]

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Examples

  • Some people accrue enough space & spondulicks to do it and put up a tennis court or squash court.

    Squash: Society and Style Zug, James 2009

  • Doug must have looked quizzical, for Chuck soon elucidated, though for some reason in archaic terms: “Mazuma, moolah, spondulicks …”

    The Houseguest Thomas Berger 2008

  • "Chuck down the spondulicks an 'I'll get off your ship."

    Captain Scraggs or, The Green-Pea Pirates Gordon [Illustrator] Grant 1918

  • "I wonder where he got the spondulicks," broke in her son Richard.

    The Fourth Watch 1910

  • Our crowd in good shape, but we need the spondulicks.

    Cabbages and Kings 1904

  • Also it was convincingly true that the ingoing party -- its way now made a pacific one -- would need the "spondulicks."

    Cabbages and Kings 1904

  • Suppose I can't raise the spondulicks in time for the ten train!

    Molly Brown's Orchard Home Nell Speed 1895

  • Our crowd in good shape, but we need the spondulicks.

    Cabbages and Kings O. Henry 1886

  • They got rid of the Int Corps chip hat as part of the Great Defence Cutback of 1975 (ish), saving an untold number of spondulicks; the buggers'll stop at nothing sacred.

    Army Rumour Service 2009

  • A seven-figure income demands low demotic if a tenured professor is to escape the lecture hall and really start pulling in the ackers, brass, bucks, coinage, needful, spondulicks, rhino et cetera ...

    Safehaven 2008

Comments

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  • Where on Earth does this fabulous word come from?

    Actually, see spondulics.

    October 15, 2007

  • I don't think this is a misspelling. I've seen at least 4 variants of it. :-)

    October 15, 2007

  • OK, I've deleted the misspelling tag!

    October 15, 2007

  • Maybe a "variant" tag? Although I do prefer this spelling. :-)

    October 15, 2007

  • Spondoolies in the Old World.

    August 9, 2008

  • (pl. noun) - A term for specie, or money. It would appear to have some connection with Dutch spaunde, "chips," slang for money; and there is a word oolik, bad, wretched. The term probably originated in New York in perversion of these words. This term has become common among English turfites. --Albert Barrère's Dictionary of Slang, Jargon, and Cant, 1889

    February 6, 2018