"William Tell" meaning in All languages combined

See William Tell on Wiktionary

Proper name [English]

Etymology: After the legendary Swiss folk hero said to have shot an apple off his son's head with an arrow. Head templates: {{en-prop}} William Tell
  1. (attributive) The act of shooting an object off the top of a person's head. Tags: attributive
    Sense id: en-William_Tell-en-name-0YZIOKwh Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header, Pages with 1 entry, Pages with entries
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          "bold_text_offsets": [
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          "ref": "2000, Jessica Treat, Not a Chance, page 25:",
          "text": "[…] did a William Tell number on his wife, you know, with a glass of gin on her head […]",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2005, Claire Elise Katz, Lara Trout, Emmanuel Levinas: Levinas and the question of religion (page 199)",
          "text": "According to Zornberg, \"Rashi cites the midrash that presents the game the boys are playing as a kind of William Tell game, with Ishmael shooting arrows at Isaac and then claiming, 'But I am only playing.'\""
        },
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          "ref": "2018, Karen Rose, Death Is Not Enough:",
          "text": "Did a William Tell type act where he shot an apple off his assistant's head.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "The act of shooting an object off the top of a person's head."
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      "raw_glosses": [
        "(attributive) The act of shooting an object off the top of a person's head."
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  "head_templates": [
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        {
          "ref": "2005, Claire Elise Katz, Lara Trout, Emmanuel Levinas: Levinas and the question of religion (page 199)",
          "text": "According to Zornberg, \"Rashi cites the midrash that presents the game the boys are playing as a kind of William Tell game, with Ishmael shooting arrows at Isaac and then claiming, 'But I am only playing.'\""
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          "bold_text_offsets": [
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      ],
      "glosses": [
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Download raw JSONL data for William Tell meaning in All languages combined (1.6kB)


This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable All languages combined dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2026-09-28 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2026-09-02 using wiktextract (1a05e46 and e3d6d4e). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.