See elbow grease on Wiktionary
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"ref": "1864, Henry Wells Holly, chapter 3, in The Art of Saw-Filing, page 12:",
"text": "It is astonishing what miserable saws are sometimes used by mechanics, or those claiming to be such. The only way they can be coaxed or driven through the wood is by having an enormous set, a liberal use of oil, and another lubricator called elbow-grease.",
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"ref": "1879, Anthony Trollope, chapter 5, in William Makepeace Thackeray:",
"text": "When we were young we used to be told, in our house at home, that \"elbow-grease\" was the one essential necessary to getting a tough piece of work well done. If a mahogany table was to be made to shine, it was elbow-grease that the operation needed.",
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"ref": "1958 July 14, R. K. Kirkland, “Into the Mountains on the Festiniog Railway”, in Railway Magazine, page 450:",
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"ref": "2019, Sunny, “Violet's Adventure”, in Sunny Day:",
"text": "Some soapy water and a little elbow grease and we'll have the Glam Van clean in no time.",
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"(idiomatic) Effort or hard work, especially physical work involving repeated motion of the forearm, such as scrubbing."
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"word": "olio di gomito"
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"lang_code": "et",
"sense": "effort or hard work",
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"english": "involving repeated motion of forearm",
"lang": "Finnish",
"lang_code": "fi",
"sense": "effort or hard work",
"translation": "involving repeated motion of forearm",
"word": "jynssäys"
},
{
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"lang": "French",
"lang_code": "fr",
"sense": "effort or hard work",
"tags": [
"feminine"
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"word": "huile de coude"
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"code": "de",
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"lang_code": "de",
"sense": "effort or hard work",
"tags": [
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"word": "Gelenkschmiere"
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"english": "fig.",
"lang": "German",
"lang_code": "de",
"sense": "effort or hard work",
"tags": [
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"translation": "fig.",
"word": "Spucke"
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"code": "it",
"lang": "Italian",
"lang_code": "it",
"sense": "effort or hard work",
"tags": [
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"word": "olio di gomito"
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"lang": "Northern Kurdish",
"lang_code": "kmr",
"sense": "effort or hard work",
"word": "rêncberî"
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"lang_code": "pl",
"sense": "effort or hard work",
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"sense": "effort or hard work",
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],
"word": "elbow grease"
}
Download raw JSONL data for elbow grease meaning in All languages combined (4.9kB)
This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable All languages combined dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2026-09-16 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2026-09-02 using wiktextract (d6fca27 and 65e1673). 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.