arm-wrestle

See also: arm wrestle

English[edit]

arm-wrestle (third-person singular simple present arm-wrestles, present participle arm-wrestling, simple past and past participle arm-wrestled)

(transitive, intransitive) To compete in an arm-wrestle (with).
Synonym: pull wrists
(transitive, intransitive, by extension) To struggle (with) for dominance.
- 1996, Linda Ty-Casper, DreamEden, →ISBN, page 318:
  Unable to give any answer, Benhur finds himself being arm-wrestled on both sides; he feels like a boy with them, unscathed as yet by Tuesday morning in Constitutional Law
- 1999, Roz D. Fox, Welcome to My Family, →ISBN, page 151:
  I arm-wrestled a promise from Gordon Dempsey that news of our night in Atlantic City would go no further.
- 2014, Rocco Rubini, The Other Renaissance: Italian Humanism between Hegel and Heidegger, →ISBN:
  In fact, throughout 1946, they continued to arm-wrestle over which of them was entitled to philosophize.
- 2015, Katrine Marcal, Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner?, →ISBN, page 62:
  The idea that war and conflicts are purely rational, calculable considerations lives on today. Even if the playing fields for the superpowers' arm-wrestling matches are no longer Berlin, Vienna, Warsaw, but instead Kabul, Tehran and Peshawar.

to compete in an arm-wrestle