call it stumps

verb

call it stumps

verb

Etymology A figurative use of the cricket expression stumps (“the close of play when the stumps are pulled out of the ground by the umpires”).

1

Idiomatic, Informal To decide to end an activity; to call it a day.

  • Eventually I decided to call it stumps and the last thing he said to me as I retired to his spare room was, `So you're not going to Inskip are you?' I answered that no, he was right, I wouldn't go and he tottered off happy.2005, Sean Dooley, The Big Twitch, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, page 130:

Entry derived from the Wiktionary, under licence CC BY-SA 4.0 — list of authors.