"game of two halves" meaning in English

See game of two halves in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Forms: games of two halves [plural]
Etymology: From football (soccer) commentary in the late 1980s. Head templates: {{en-noun|games of two halves}} game of two halves (plural games of two halves)
  1. Something that makes a major turnaround over the course of its lifespan. Categories (topical): Football (soccer)

Inflected forms

Download JSON data for game of two halves meaning in English (2.3kB)

{
  "etymology_text": "From football (soccer) commentary in the late 1980s.",
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "games of two halves",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "games of two halves"
      },
      "expansion": "game of two halves (plural games of two halves)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
          "parents": [
            "Entries with incorrect language header",
            "Entry maintenance"
          ],
          "source": "w"
        },
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English entries with topic categories using raw markup",
          "parents": [
            "Entries with topic categories using raw markup",
            "Entry maintenance"
          ],
          "source": "w"
        },
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys",
          "parents": [
            "Terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys",
            "Entry maintenance"
          ],
          "source": "w"
        },
        {
          "kind": "topical",
          "langcode": "en",
          "name": "Football (soccer)",
          "orig": "en:Football (soccer)",
          "parents": [
            "Football",
            "Ball games",
            "Sports",
            "Human activity",
            "Human behaviour",
            "Human",
            "All topics",
            "Fundamental"
          ],
          "source": "w"
        }
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "2011, Tom Campbell, Fold, page 105",
          "text": "In a few minutes they would be reporting their performances for Vijay's spreadsheet, and Doug would be almost certain to say it had been a game of two halves. Well, it had been for him at least. Nick had been losing all night, but looking across the table it seemed that Doug was back where he'd started.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2011, David Gilbert, David Matless, Brian Short, Geographies of British Modernity: Space and Society in the Twentieth Century",
          "text": "The Conservative century was therefore a game of two halves with regard to the procedures for defining parliamentary constituencies.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2001, Fred Botting, The Gothic, page 78",
          "text": "We also understand why Dracula is a game of two halves: the first half (the attack) takes us from the Natural to the Unnatural path; the second half takes us back.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "Something that makes a major turnaround over the course of its lifespan."
      ],
      "id": "en-game_of_two_halves-en-noun-490VCUTe",
      "links": [
        [
          "turnaround",
          "turnaround"
        ],
        [
          "lifespan",
          "lifespan"
        ]
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "game of two halves"
}
{
  "etymology_text": "From football (soccer) commentary in the late 1980s.",
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "games of two halves",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "games of two halves"
      },
      "expansion": "game of two halves (plural games of two halves)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        "English countable nouns",
        "English entries with incorrect language header",
        "English entries with topic categories using raw markup",
        "English lemmas",
        "English multiword terms",
        "English nouns",
        "English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys",
        "English terms with quotations",
        "en:Football (soccer)"
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "2011, Tom Campbell, Fold, page 105",
          "text": "In a few minutes they would be reporting their performances for Vijay's spreadsheet, and Doug would be almost certain to say it had been a game of two halves. Well, it had been for him at least. Nick had been losing all night, but looking across the table it seemed that Doug was back where he'd started.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2011, David Gilbert, David Matless, Brian Short, Geographies of British Modernity: Space and Society in the Twentieth Century",
          "text": "The Conservative century was therefore a game of two halves with regard to the procedures for defining parliamentary constituencies.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2001, Fred Botting, The Gothic, page 78",
          "text": "We also understand why Dracula is a game of two halves: the first half (the attack) takes us from the Natural to the Unnatural path; the second half takes us back.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "Something that makes a major turnaround over the course of its lifespan."
      ],
      "links": [
        [
          "turnaround",
          "turnaround"
        ],
        [
          "lifespan",
          "lifespan"
        ]
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "game of two halves"
}

This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-05 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-05-02 using wiktextract (f4fd8c9 and c9440ce). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.