See pull the football on Wiktionary
{
"etymology_text": "From a running gag in the American comic strip Peanuts by Charles Schulz. Typically, Lucy Van Pelt holds a football for Charlie Brown to kick, only to pull it away and cause him to fall over. The gag first appeared in the November 14, 1951 comic.",
"forms": [
{
"form": "pulls the football",
"tags": [
"present",
"singular",
"third-person"
]
},
{
"form": "pulling the football",
"tags": [
"participle",
"present"
]
},
{
"form": "pulled the football",
"tags": [
"participle",
"past"
]
},
{
"form": "pulled the football",
"tags": [
"past"
]
},
{
"form": "pull the football away",
"tags": [
"alternative"
]
},
{
"form": "yank the football",
"tags": [
"alternative"
]
}
],
"head_templates": [
{
"args": {
"1": "<>"
},
"expansion": "pull the football (third-person singular simple present pulls the football, present participle pulling the football, simple past and past participle pulled the football)",
"name": "en-verb"
}
],
"lang": "English",
"lang_code": "en",
"pos": "verb",
"senses": [
{
"categories": [
{
"kind": "other",
"name": "American English",
"parents": [],
"source": "w"
},
{
"kind": "other",
"name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
"parents": [],
"source": "w"
},
{
"kind": "other",
"name": "Pages with 1 entry",
"parents": [],
"source": "w"
},
{
"kind": "other",
"name": "Pages with entries",
"parents": [],
"source": "w"
}
],
"examples": [
{
"ref": "2013 February 10, Shea-Taylor, quotee, “Pulling the football on the push for gay rights”, in The Sun Chronicle:",
"text": "[see title]",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"bold_text_offsets": [
[
39,
58
]
],
"ref": "2022, Erik Loomis, “Review: Latin America and the Radical Left: Reconsidering Transnational Solidarity”, in New Labor Forum, volume 29, number 2, pages 109-112:",
"text": "Instead, they took the deportation and pulled the football away on doing anything to keep immigrants in this nation.",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"bold_text_offsets": [
[
64,
83
]
],
"ref": "2023 April 24, Ross Brady, quotee, “New Assembly maps head to state legislature with few changes to current lines”, in Queens Daily Eagle:",
"text": "But in several instances, in several places, I think we kind of pulled the football away, to use an analogy, from groups such as Southeast Asians in Queens",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"bold_text_offsets": [
[
16,
36
]
],
"ref": "2025 April 9, Rich McCormick, quotee, “Johnson punts on key budget blueprint vote as GOP holdouts seek concessions on spending cuts”, in CNN:",
"text": "“If you keep on pulling the football from when I’m kicking, eventually you’re going to get a little wary,” McCormick told CNN of his hesitation to get in line again.",
"type": "quotation"
}
],
"glosses": [
"To appear to make someone a promising offer, only to withdraw it to the detriment of the other party."
],
"id": "en-pull_the_football-en-verb-VZAPRYms",
"links": [
[
"appear",
"appear"
],
[
"withdraw",
"withdraw"
],
[
"detriment",
"detriment"
]
],
"raw_glosses": [
"(US, colloquial) To appear to make someone a promising offer, only to withdraw it to the detriment of the other party."
],
"tags": [
"US",
"colloquial"
],
"wikipedia": [
"Charles Schulz",
"Charlie Brown",
"Lucy Van Pelt",
"Peanuts"
]
}
],
"word": "pull the football"
}
{
"etymology_text": "From a running gag in the American comic strip Peanuts by Charles Schulz. Typically, Lucy Van Pelt holds a football for Charlie Brown to kick, only to pull it away and cause him to fall over. The gag first appeared in the November 14, 1951 comic.",
"forms": [
{
"form": "pulls the football",
"tags": [
"present",
"singular",
"third-person"
]
},
{
"form": "pulling the football",
"tags": [
"participle",
"present"
]
},
{
"form": "pulled the football",
"tags": [
"participle",
"past"
]
},
{
"form": "pulled the football",
"tags": [
"past"
]
},
{
"form": "pull the football away",
"tags": [
"alternative"
]
},
{
"form": "yank the football",
"tags": [
"alternative"
]
}
],
"head_templates": [
{
"args": {
"1": "<>"
},
"expansion": "pull the football (third-person singular simple present pulls the football, present participle pulling the football, simple past and past participle pulled the football)",
"name": "en-verb"
}
],
"lang": "English",
"lang_code": "en",
"pos": "verb",
"senses": [
{
"categories": [
"American English",
"English colloquialisms",
"English entries with incorrect language header",
"English lemmas",
"English multiword terms",
"English terms with quotations",
"English verbs",
"Pages with 1 entry",
"Pages with entries"
],
"examples": [
{
"ref": "2013 February 10, Shea-Taylor, quotee, “Pulling the football on the push for gay rights”, in The Sun Chronicle:",
"text": "[see title]",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"bold_text_offsets": [
[
39,
58
]
],
"ref": "2022, Erik Loomis, “Review: Latin America and the Radical Left: Reconsidering Transnational Solidarity”, in New Labor Forum, volume 29, number 2, pages 109-112:",
"text": "Instead, they took the deportation and pulled the football away on doing anything to keep immigrants in this nation.",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"bold_text_offsets": [
[
64,
83
]
],
"ref": "2023 April 24, Ross Brady, quotee, “New Assembly maps head to state legislature with few changes to current lines”, in Queens Daily Eagle:",
"text": "But in several instances, in several places, I think we kind of pulled the football away, to use an analogy, from groups such as Southeast Asians in Queens",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"bold_text_offsets": [
[
16,
36
]
],
"ref": "2025 April 9, Rich McCormick, quotee, “Johnson punts on key budget blueprint vote as GOP holdouts seek concessions on spending cuts”, in CNN:",
"text": "“If you keep on pulling the football from when I’m kicking, eventually you’re going to get a little wary,” McCormick told CNN of his hesitation to get in line again.",
"type": "quotation"
}
],
"glosses": [
"To appear to make someone a promising offer, only to withdraw it to the detriment of the other party."
],
"links": [
[
"appear",
"appear"
],
[
"withdraw",
"withdraw"
],
[
"detriment",
"detriment"
]
],
"raw_glosses": [
"(US, colloquial) To appear to make someone a promising offer, only to withdraw it to the detriment of the other party."
],
"tags": [
"US",
"colloquial"
],
"wikipedia": [
"Charles Schulz",
"Charlie Brown",
"Lucy Van Pelt",
"Peanuts"
]
}
],
"word": "pull the football"
}
Download raw JSONL data for pull the football meaning in All languages combined (3.0kB)
This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable All languages combined dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2025-12-26 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2025-12-20 using wiktextract (cdfa371 and 9905b1f). 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.