black ace

English

Noun

black ace (plural black aces)

1. (ice hockey) A player from a junior league who is called up by an NHL team after their original team's season has ended and kept as a reserve player.
   • 1985, The New York Times Biographical Service - Volume 16, page 210:

     At one time or another every Springfield player was designated a "black ace." According to Kilrea, that meant reporting to the rink at 8:30 in the morning and skating from 9 to 11. Another session followed in the afternoon, from 12 to 2, and Shore would keep his ace, or aces, out on the ice sometimes until 4 P.M. All in the name of discipline.

   • 2011, Rob Simpson, Black and Gold: Four Decades of the Boston Bruins in Photographs:

     We'd have our morning skate and then I would have the black aces stay out, the guys that weren't gonna dress.

   • 2014, Terry Ryan, Tales of a First-Round Nothing: My Life as an NHL Footnote:

     We spent a lot of time with the Habs as “black aces” —players who practised with the team as fifth-liners and wouldn't get into the lineup unless there was an injury to one of the veteran players.

2. (slang) An elite mafia hitman.
   • 1968, Polly Rose Gottlieb, The Nine Lives of Billy Rose, page 92:

     The big man in the Mafia said: 'Billy, me and the boys are praying for you. We know you're up against the big one this time, the big black ace'.

   • 1996, William Henry Young, A Study of Action-Adventure Fiction, page 186:

     In Missouri Deathwatch, Newton brings forth another Black Ace, this time a shadowy man called, simply, Stone.

   • 2011, Don Pendleton, Enemy Agents, page 16:

     He'd even played the role of a Mafia “black ace” for several months, back in his old life, and had sold it to the toughest critics in the world.

3. (obsolete, euphemistic) A woman's sexual favours, or a woman who gives them.
   • 1676, George Etherege, The Man of Mode:

     Blame her not poor Woman, she loves nothing so well as a black ace.

   • 167?, John Wilmot Earl of Rochester, A Trial of the Poets for the Bays:

     The poetess Afra next shew'd her sweet face, And swore by her poetry, and her black ace, The laurel by a double right was her own, For the plays she had writ, and the conquests she had won.

   • 1766, Jonathan Swift, Jounal to Stella:

     Go, go, go to the dean's, and don't mind politicks, young women, they are not good after the waters; they are stark naught: they strike up into the head. Go, get two black aces, and fish for a manilio.

4. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see black,‎ ace.

   The ace of spades is a black ace.

Anagrams

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