1. One whose business it is to make cabinets (sense 5), and the finer kind of joiner’s work.
1681. Trial S. Colledge, 40. Mr. Attorn. Gen. What Trade are you?
Mr. Hickm. A Cabinet-maker.
1689. Luttrell, Brief Rel. (1857), I. 614. One Johnson, a popish cabinet maker, is taken into custody.
1727. Swift, Gulliver, II. iii. The queen commanded her own cabinet-maker to contrive a box.
1872. Yeats, Techn. Hist. Comm., 43. Joiners’ and cabinet-makers’ work.
2. casual. One who constructs a political cabinet.
1884. Boston (Mass.) Jrnl., 22 Nov., 2/4. The Cabinet-makers, office-seekers, and schemers who abound in Washington.
Hence Cabinet making, the cabinet-maker’s occupation; the construction of a political cabinet.
1813. in Examiner, 31 Jan., 71/2.
| Here’s a choice set of Tools for you, Ge’mmen and Ladies, | |
| They’ll fit you quite handy, whatever your trade is; | |
| (Except it be Cabinet-making …). |
1882. Besant, All Sorts, 116. The gentle craft of cabinet-making.
1885. Pall Mall Gaz., 16 June, 1/2. Hitches are inevitable whenever Cabinet-making is undertaken.
