dinner-party

plural dinner-parties

1. alternativeAlternative form of dinner party.

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

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

   5 more examples

   [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 …

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

   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.

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

   "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 inquiry). Why the plague did he ask me here? it was Puddock's turn, and he likes venison and compots,[…]"

   1863, J[oseph] Sheridan Le Fanu, “Which Concerns the Grand Dinner at the King’s House, and Who Were There, and Something of Their Talk, Reveries, Disputes, and General Jollity”, in The House by the Church-yard. […], volume I, London: Tinsley, Brothers, […], →OCLC, page 233

   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.

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

   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.

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