See I kid you not on Wiktionary
{
"etymology_text": "Earliest known use is from November 3, 1943 on The Centenary Conglomerate.\nA print reference of the phrase appeared in 1948 in the International Stereotypers' and Electrotypers' Union Journal, Volume 43:\nBoy!, Oh Boy! I said I asked for a headache when I volunteered for this job, and I kid you not when I repeat it.\nIt next appeared as a phrase spoken by Lieutenant Commander Philip Francis Queeg in Herman Wouk's 1951 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, \"The Caine Mutiny\":\nThat's the Navy for you. Pass the buck and get a receipt. Act at discretion, hey? Well that's exactly what I'm going to do, and I kid you not.\nIt was later popularized by Jack Paar, host of The Tonight Show from 1957 to 1962, who used this as his signature phrase. It humorously combines the colloquial verb kid with the archaic negation through not without do-support.",
"head_templates": [
{
"args": {
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"2": "phrase"
},
"expansion": "I kid you not",
"name": "head"
}
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"lang": "English",
"lang_code": "en",
"pos": "phrase",
"senses": [
{
"categories": [
{
"kind": "other",
"name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
"parents": [
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"Entry maintenance"
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"source": "w"
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{
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}
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"examples": [
{
"ref": "2011, Jonathan Marc Sherman, Knickerbocker, page 25:",
"text": "...I leaf through the stack of magazines they've got, and one of them — I kid you not — one of them is a Naughty Nurses magazine.",
"type": "quote"
}
],
"glosses": [
"Used to insist that one is telling the truth."
],
"id": "en-I_kid_you_not-en-phrase-9XK6sbHN",
"raw_glosses": [
"(colloquial) Used to insist that one is telling the truth."
],
"synonyms": [
{
"tags": [
"vulgar"
],
"word": "I shit you not"
},
{
"tags": [
"vulgar"
],
"word": "I fuck you not"
}
],
"tags": [
"colloquial"
],
"translations": [
{
"code": "fi",
"lang": "Finnish",
"sense": "Translations",
"word": "en(kä) narraa"
},
{
"code": "fi",
"lang": "Finnish",
"sense": "Translations",
"word": "en(kä) petkuta"
},
{
"code": "fi",
"lang": "Finnish",
"sense": "Translations",
"word": "en(kä) puijaa"
},
{
"code": "fi",
"lang": "Finnish",
"sense": "Translations",
"word": "en(kä) juksaa"
},
{
"code": "fr",
"lang": "French",
"sense": "Translations",
"word": "ce n’est pas une blague"
},
{
"code": "de",
"lang": "German",
"sense": "Translations",
"word": "ich schwör's dir"
},
{
"code": "de",
"lang": "German",
"sense": "Translations",
"tags": [
"slang"
],
"word": "kein Scheiß"
},
{
"code": "pl",
"lang": "Polish",
"sense": "Translations",
"word": "nie żartuję"
},
{
"code": "es",
"lang": "Spanish",
"sense": "Translations",
"word": "no bromeo"
},
{
"code": "es",
"lang": "Spanish",
"sense": "Translations",
"word": "no es broma"
}
],
"wikipedia": [
"Jack Paar",
"The Tonight Show"
]
}
],
"word": "I kid you not"
}
{
"etymology_text": "Earliest known use is from November 3, 1943 on The Centenary Conglomerate.\nA print reference of the phrase appeared in 1948 in the International Stereotypers' and Electrotypers' Union Journal, Volume 43:\nBoy!, Oh Boy! I said I asked for a headache when I volunteered for this job, and I kid you not when I repeat it.\nIt next appeared as a phrase spoken by Lieutenant Commander Philip Francis Queeg in Herman Wouk's 1951 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, \"The Caine Mutiny\":\nThat's the Navy for you. Pass the buck and get a receipt. Act at discretion, hey? Well that's exactly what I'm going to do, and I kid you not.\nIt was later popularized by Jack Paar, host of The Tonight Show from 1957 to 1962, who used this as his signature phrase. It humorously combines the colloquial verb kid with the archaic negation through not without do-support.",
"head_templates": [
{
"args": {
"1": "en",
"2": "phrase"
},
"expansion": "I kid you not",
"name": "head"
}
],
"lang": "English",
"lang_code": "en",
"pos": "phrase",
"senses": [
{
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"English entries with incorrect language header",
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"English phrases",
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"Terms with French translations",
"Terms with German translations",
"Terms with Polish translations",
"Terms with Spanish translations",
"Translation table header lacks gloss"
],
"examples": [
{
"ref": "2011, Jonathan Marc Sherman, Knickerbocker, page 25:",
"text": "...I leaf through the stack of magazines they've got, and one of them — I kid you not — one of them is a Naughty Nurses magazine.",
"type": "quote"
}
],
"glosses": [
"Used to insist that one is telling the truth."
],
"raw_glosses": [
"(colloquial) Used to insist that one is telling the truth."
],
"tags": [
"colloquial"
],
"wikipedia": [
"Jack Paar",
"The Tonight Show"
]
}
],
"synonyms": [
{
"tags": [
"vulgar"
],
"word": "I shit you not"
},
{
"tags": [
"vulgar"
],
"word": "I fuck you not"
}
],
"translations": [
{
"code": "fi",
"lang": "Finnish",
"sense": "Translations",
"word": "en(kä) narraa"
},
{
"code": "fi",
"lang": "Finnish",
"sense": "Translations",
"word": "en(kä) petkuta"
},
{
"code": "fi",
"lang": "Finnish",
"sense": "Translations",
"word": "en(kä) puijaa"
},
{
"code": "fi",
"lang": "Finnish",
"sense": "Translations",
"word": "en(kä) juksaa"
},
{
"code": "fr",
"lang": "French",
"sense": "Translations",
"word": "ce n’est pas une blague"
},
{
"code": "de",
"lang": "German",
"sense": "Translations",
"word": "ich schwör's dir"
},
{
"code": "de",
"lang": "German",
"sense": "Translations",
"tags": [
"slang"
],
"word": "kein Scheiß"
},
{
"code": "pl",
"lang": "Polish",
"sense": "Translations",
"word": "nie żartuję"
},
{
"code": "es",
"lang": "Spanish",
"sense": "Translations",
"word": "no bromeo"
},
{
"code": "es",
"lang": "Spanish",
"sense": "Translations",
"word": "no es broma"
}
],
"word": "I kid you not"
}
Download raw JSONL data for I kid you not meaning in All languages combined (2.9kB)
This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable All languages combined dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2025-01-13 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2025-01-01 using wiktextract (4ba5975 and 4ed51a5). 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.