1. The practice of fraudulently bidding on items at an auction solely to drive up the price. • The seller might collude with another person to bid or might act alone and anonymously. Cf. BIDDING UP; BY-BIDDING.
2. Hist. An English coin equal to 12 pence or 1/20th of a pound. • Shillings were revalued as five pence and phased out when decimalization was adopted in the early 1970s. The modern five-pence coin, like its predecessor equal to 1/20th of a pound, is sometimes nostalgically referred to as a shilling.
