Definition of "club"

club

/klʌb/

noun
plural clubs
1. An association of members joining together for some common purpose, especially sports or recreation.
  Quotations
  At half-past nine on this Saturday evening, the parlour of the Salutation Inn, High Holborn, contained most of its customary visitors. […] In former days every tavern of repute kept such a room for its own select circle, a club, or society, of habitués, who met every evening, for a pipe and a cheerful glass.
  1892, Walter Besant, chapter III, in The Ivory Gate […], New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, […]
  1. (archaic) The fees associated with belonging to such a club.
    Quotations
    He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it.
    1783, Benjamin Franklin
2. A heavy object, often a kind of stick, intended for use as a bludgeoning weapon or a plaything.
  Quotations
  There were many wooden chairs for the bulk of his visitors, and two wicker armchairs with red cloth cushions for superior people. From the packing-cases had emerged some Indian clubs, […], and all these articles […] made a scattered and untidy decoration that Mrs. Clough assiduously dusted and greatly cherished.
  1918, W[illiam] B[abington] Maxwell, chapter XII, in The Mirror and the Lamp, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company
  The attack also afforded Helena to a front-seat view of literal air-to-air melee combat, as one Wildcat pilot of the Cactus Air Force, who was swooping in to help break up the attack, found himself out of machine-gun ammo; instead, he dropped his landing gear, positioned himself above the nearest bomber, and begun beating it to death, in midair, using his landing gear as clubs. After a bit of evasive action that the fighter easily kept up with, the repeated slamming broke something important, and the bomber spiralled down into the sea.
  2021 March 10, Drachinifel, 5:50 from the start, in Guadalcanal Campaign - The Big Night Battle: Night 1 (IJN 3(?) : 2 USN)‎, archived from the original on 17 October 2022
  1. An implement to hit the ball in certain ball games, such as golf.
3. A joint charge of expense, or any person's share of it; a contribution to a common fund.
  Quotations
  They laid down the Club.
  1692, Roger L’Estrange, “ (please specify the fable number.) (please specify the name of the fable.)”, in Fables, of Æsop and Other Eminent Mythologists: […], London: […] R[ichard] Sare, […]
  first we went and dined at a French house , but paid 10s for our part of the club
  17 Mat 1660, Samuel Pepys, diary
4. An establishment that provides staged entertainment, often with food and drink, such as a nightclub.
5. (card games) A black clover shape (♣), one of the four symbols used to mark the suits of playing cards.
  1. A playing card marked with such a symbol.
6. (humorous) Any set of people with a shared characteristic.
  Quotations
  He also wanted to be only the second person to travel solo to at least that depth, the other being James Cameron, who in 2012 took an Australian-built sub into the Mariana Trench, reaching Challenger Deep, the ocean’s deepest point, touching down at close to 36,000 feet. “That’s a nice club to be a part of,” Rush says. Two weeks later, that club welcomed a new member, when a Texas businessman named Victor Vescovo reached 27,000 feet in his own experimental submersible.
  2019, Tony Perrottet, “A Deep Dive Into the Plans to Take Tourists to the ‘Titanic’”, in Smithsonian Magazine
7. A club sandwich.
  Quotations
  Crab cake sandwiches, tuna melts, chicken clubs, salmon cakes, and prime-rib sandwiches are usually on the menu.
  2004, Joanne M. Anderson, Small-town Restaurants in Virginia, page 123
8. The slice of bread in the middle of a club sandwich.
verb
third-person singular simple present clubs, present participle clubbing, simple past and past participle clubbed
1. (transitive) To hit with a club.
2. (intransitive) To join together to form a group.
  Quotations
  Till grosser atoms, tumbling in the stream / Of fancy, madly met, and clubb'd into a dream.
  1687, [John Dryden], “(please specify the page number)”, in The Hind and the Panther. A Poem, in Three Parts, 2nd edition, London: […] Jacob Tonson […]
3. (intransitive, transitive) To combine into a club-shaped mass.
4. (intransitive) To go to nightclubs.
  Quotations
  In London you lived on beans, but you clubbed all night
  1997, Sarah Penny, The whiteness of bones‎, page 4
  I was rarely there —I was clubbing at night, sleeping during the day, back and forth to L.A.—but I had more money than I knew what to do with.
  2011, Mackenzie Phillips, High on Arrival‎
  He had been clubbing until the early hours
  2013, Fabrice Humbert, Sila's Fortune‎
5. (intransitive) To pay an equal or proportionate share of a common charge or expense.
  Quotations
  The owl, the raven, and the bat / Clubb'd for a feather to his hat.
  1730, Jonathan Swift, Death and Daphne
6. (transitive) To raise, or defray, by a proportional assessment.
7. (nautical) To drift in a current with an anchor out.
8. (military) To throw, or allow to fall, into confusion.
  Quotations
  To club a battalion implies a temporary inability in the commanding officer to restore any given body of men to their natural front in line or column.
  1876, Major-General G. E. Voyle, Captain G. De Saint-Clair-Stevenson, F.R.G.S., A Military Dictionary, Comprising Terms, Scientific and Otherwise, Connected with the Science of War, Third Edition, London: William Clowes & Sons, page 80
9. (transitive) To unite, or contribute, for the accomplishment of a common end.
  Quotations
  For instance, let us suppose that Homer and Virgil, Aristotle and Cicero, Thucydides and Livy, could have met all together, and have clubbed their several talents to have composed a treatise on the art of dancing: I believe it will be readily agreed they could not have equalled the excellent treatise which Mr Essex hath given us on that subject, entitled, The Rudiments of Genteel Education.
  1749, Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, volumes (please specify |volume=I to VI), London: A[ndrew] Millar, […]
  You see a person, who, added to yourself, would make, you think, a glorious being, and you proceed to idealize accordingly; you stand on his head, and outtower the tallest; you club your brains with his, and are wiser than the wisest; you add the heat of your heart to his, and produce a very furnace of love.
  1854, The Eclectic Review, page 147
10. (transitive, military) To turn the breech of (a musket) uppermost, so as to use it as a club.