The name of a game (or games) of cards. Also one-and-thirty: see ONE 2 b.
Cf. F. trente et un; ‘il consiste à compléter 31 points; qui passe perd’ (Littré).
[1549. Latimer, 5th Serm. bef. Edw. VI. (Arb.), 149. It is like he gaue one to his man for his laboure to make vp the game, and so ther was xxxi.
1596, 1632, 1654: see PIP sb.2 1 b.)
1834–43. Southey, Doctor, cxlii. (1848), 356/1. A Frenchman … published a Treatise upon the game of Thirty-One.
1903. in Hoffmann, Card & Table Games (ed. 3), 249. Thirty-one (the German Schnautz)…. The primary object of the game is to hold three cards of the same suit, which shall together make ‘thirty-one’; the ace counting eleven, court cards ten each.
