Dictionary

black ace en · NOUN

Meanings

1. 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.
   • 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. 1985, The New York Times Biographical Service - Volume 16, page 210:
   • We'd have our morning skate and then I would have the black aces stay out, the guys that weren't gonna dress. 2011, Rob Simpson, Black and Gold: Four Decades of the Boston Bruins in Photographs:
   • 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. 2014, Terry Ryan, Tales of a First-Round Nothing: My Life as an NHL Footnote:
2. (slang) An elite mafia hitman.
   • In Missouri Deathwatch, Newton brings forth another Black Ace, this time a shadowy man called, simply, Stone. 1996, William Henry Young, A Study of Action-Adventure Fiction, page 186:
   • 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'. 1968, Polly Rose Gottlieb, The Nine Lives of Billy Rose, page 92:
   • 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. 2011, Don Pendleton, Enemy Agents, page 16:
3. (euphemistic, obsolete) A woman's sexual favours, or a woman who gives them.
   • 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. 167?, John Wilmot Earl of Rochester, A Trial of the Poets for the Bays:
   • 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. 1766, Jonathan Swift, Jounal to Stella:
   • Blame her not poor Woman, she loves nothing so well as a black ace. 1676, George Etherege, The Man of Mode:
4. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see black, ace.
   • The ace of spades is a black ace.

Forms