See Mexican standoff on Wiktionary
Download JSON data for Mexican standoff meaning in All languages combined (8.0kB)
{
"etymology_text": "1876 US.\nThree-way gun standoffs, popularized in spaghetti westerns such as The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (1966), have come to be called Mexican standoffs, though this usage appears to date to the 1990s, notably in reference to Reservoir Dogs (1992); earlier usage refers to this as a “three-way standoff” or “triangular standoff”.",
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"A confrontation among two or more armed parties, none of which wants to attack first (fearing that the other could retaliate), but neither of which will disarm (for fear the other will attack)."
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"(slang) A stalemate, or a confrontation among two or more sides that no side can win.",
"(slang) A confrontation among two or more armed parties, none of which wants to attack first (fearing that the other could retaliate), but neither of which will disarm (for fear the other will attack)."
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"ref": "1994, Quentin Tarantino, David Veloz, Natural Born Killers, spoken by Mickey (Woody Harrelson)",
"text": "Looks like we got us a Mexican Standoff.",
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{
"ref": "1999, Foster Hirsch, Detours and Lost Highways: A Map of Neo-noir, page 259",
"text": "[About Reservoir Dogs] In this scene, and in the three-way shootout, a Mexican standoff, the extreme, almost operatic violence is grazed with black comedy",
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"(slang) A stalemate, or a confrontation among two or more sides that no side can win.",
"(slang) A three-way or more standoff."
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"(slang) A stalemate, or a confrontation among two or more sides that no side can win.",
"(slang, poker) A pot that is split among the players because of a tie."
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"ref": "1876 March 19, F. Harvey Smith, “Mexican Stand-Off”, in Sunday Mercury, New York, page 2/col. 5",
"text": "“Go-!” said he sternly then. “We will call it a stand-off, a Mexican stand-off, you lose your money, but you save your life!”",
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"ref": "1891 September, N.Y. Sporting Times, volume 19, page 4/col. 3",
"text": "‘Monk’ Cline, who got a Mexican stand-off from Dave Rowe has signed with Louisville.",
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"A near-collision between two trains; an averted cornfield meet."
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"(rail transport) A near-collision between two trains; an averted cornfield meet."
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"etymology_text": "1876 US.\nThree-way gun standoffs, popularized in spaghetti westerns such as The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (1966), have come to be called Mexican standoffs, though this usage appears to date to the 1990s, notably in reference to Reservoir Dogs (1992); earlier usage refers to this as a “three-way standoff” or “triangular standoff”.",
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"A stalemate, or a confrontation among two or more sides that no side can win.",
"An inconclusive standoff, ending in mutual retreat."
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"(slang) A stalemate, or a confrontation among two or more sides that no side can win.",
"(slang) An inconclusive standoff, ending in mutual retreat."
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"A stalemate, or a confrontation among two or more sides that no side can win.",
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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable All languages combined dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-04-26 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-04-21 using wiktextract (93a6c53 and 21a9316). 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.