monte
monte Lexical Profile
monte Game Scores & Validity
• noun
A Spanish and Mexican gambling card game played with a forty-card deck in which players bet against a banker on which suits or cards will be turned up from the pack.
"During the nineteenth century, frontier saloons across the American Southwest frequently hosted high-stakes games of monte."
Short for three-card monte, a confidence game in which a dealer manipulates three face-down cards and challenges an onlooker to identify the location of a target card.
"Street-corner hustlers used sleight of hand to lure unsuspecting tourists into playing monte."
An arid to semiarid ecoregion and scrubland biome in South America, situated primarily in western and southern Argentina, characterized by thorny shrubs, cacti, and dry woodland.
"Botanists surveyed the thorny creosote bushes and columnar cacti native to the Argentine monte."
• Rhymes for monte
• Nearby Words
Word Origin & Etymology
Borrowed from Spanish 'monte', meaning 'mountain', 'hill', or 'woodland', from Latin 'mons' ('mountain'). In gambling contexts, it referred to the stack or 'mountain' of remaining cards on the table.