Fig

A “five-pence,” or “fippenny bit.”

1814.  Here [in Philadelphia] every article goes by fi’p’s; so many fi’p’s; (about five pennies) a piece, or dozen.—Henry C. Knight (‘Arthur Singleton’), ‘Letters from the South and West,’ p. 28 (Boston, 1824).

1822.  A dispute now commenced between two persons respecting some cents and a “fip,” which had fallen from his pocket as he rolled in the straw: one asserting that there were two “fips,” and the other that there was but one.—Philadelphia Freeman’s Journal, Sept. 5.

1824.  We have whiskey at “three fips” per gallon.—Letter from Cincinnati, Mass. Yeoman, March 3.

1832.  He … drew [out] … rather more dollars, half dollars, levies, and fips, than his dirty little hand could well hold.—Mrs. Trollope, ‘Domestic Manners of the Americans,’ i. 171.

1832.  I fell in with one of the curly-headed descendants of Ham, who was willing to pull me over for a couple of “fips,” and we struck a bargain at once.—E. C. Wines, ‘Two Years and a Half in the Navy,’ i. 8 (Phila.). (Italics in the original.)

1834.  His pockets had never felt the weight of a single fip which did not somehow or other find its way into the family locker.—Vermont Free Press, Oct. 4.

1836.  We were aroused by a remark from a gentleman at our elbow, who, with a fip in his dexter hand, between the thumb and fore-finger, said, “Go, bring something to drink.”—Phila. Public Ledger, Sept. 5.

1837.  The name Picayune is the Creole … for what we call a Fip.—Id., Feb. 7.

1838.  

1840.  Sim Travers, who had a drinking shed at the lower end of the canal basin, with equal public spirit, uttered his paper in fips, “Good for a Drink.”—John P. Kennedy, ‘Quodlibet,’ p. 172 (1860).

1849.  He had given the gentleman credit for eight dollars and a fip in the omnibus.—Mr. Root of Ohio, House of Repr., Jan. 9: Cong. Globe, p. 203.

1855.  [The boy had] the tempting reward of a fip-penny piece before him.—W. G. Simms, ‘Border Beagles,’ p. 252 (N.Y.).

1856.  By and by he will give you a fip to buy salve for those cuts!—H. B. Stowe, ‘Dred,’ chap. xviii.

1857.  “Do you want any meal, ma’am?” “What do you ask for a bushel?” “Ten cents, ma’am, prime.” “O, I can get it for a fip.”—Oregon Weekly Times, March 7.

1857.  Last night, yesterday morning, about two o’clock in the afternoon, before breakfast, a hungry boy forty years old bought a fip custard for a levy, and threw it through a brick wall nine feet thick, and jumped over it, and broke his ankle right above his knee, and fell into a dry mill-pond, and was drowned.—Id., Aug. 15.

1858.  

  See also THRIP.