Dictionary

five-barred gate en · NOUN

Meanings

1. A wide, usually wooden gate consisting of five horizontal bars and one or more diagonal braces, typically used as a field gate for livestock or as an entrance to a rural driveway.
   • Meanwhile the animals had chased Jones and his men out on to the road and slammed the five-barred gate behind them. 1945, George Orwell, chapter 2, in Animal Farm, page 29:
   • […] he rarely allowed himself a day’s hunting; and when he did so, it was remarkable that he submitted to be laughed at for cowardliness at the fences, seeming to see Mary and the boys sitting on the five-barred gate, or showing their curly heads between hedge and ditch. 1872, George Eliot, Middlemarch, volume 4, page 360:
   • […] they set out together, and with some difficulty found Gilbert [the horse] with his neck stretched over a five-barred gate, snuffing up the morning-air. 1762, Tobias Smollett, The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves, volume 1, page 167:
   • The only revenge which the younger Clergy cou’d return, wou’d be […] to order that whosoever cou’d not read a Geneva-Bible at two yards distance and vault over a five-barr’d Gate, should forfeit his Mitre […] 1690, Thomas Brown, The Late Converts Exposed, page 17:
2. (UK) Tally marks representing 5, made up of four vertical lines crossed by a diagonal line, used to count objects, keep score, etc.
   • When we come to the fifth score we do not make a further upright stroke, but a diagonal stroke from top right to bottom left across the previous four—and this stroke completes the Five-Barred Gate […] 1973, Frank Herbert Hansford-Miller, Quantitative Geography for Schools: Book One, page 15:
   • Items are grouped in fives, and each fifth item is a cross stroke on the first four strokes. Each set of five is sometimes known as a five-bar gate. 2009, Shaun Procter-Green, AQA GCSE Statistics, section 3.1:

Forms