See fly-by-night on Wiktionary
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"A creature which flies at night; a nocturnal flier or traveler."
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"(often attributive) One who departs or flees at night in order to avoid creditors, law enforcement etc."
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"text": "True, it was a good advertisement at Boosters' Club lunches, and all the varieties of Annual Banquets to which Good Fellows were invited, to speak sonorously of […] a thing called Ethics, whose nature was confusing but if you had it you were a High-class Realtor and if you hadn't you were a shyster, a piker, and a fly-by-night.",
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"ref": "1998 January 24, Bill Clinton, Presidential Radio Address:",
"text": "Second, it will ensure that when fly-by-night providers go bankrupt, Medicare is at the top of the list of debts to be repaid. And finally, it will bring down costs by allowing Medicare to purchase goods and services at a competitive price.",
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316,
328
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"text": "True, it was a good advertisement at Boosters' Club lunches, and all the varieties of Annual Banquets to which Good Fellows were invited, to speak sonorously of […] a thing called Ethics, whose nature was confusing but if you had it you were a High-class Realtor and if you hadn't you were a shyster, a piker, and a fly-by-night.",
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45
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}
],
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"(idiomatic, derogatory) A person or business that appears and/or disappears rapidly, appearing untrustworthy, or giving an impression of transience."
],
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"derogatory",
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]
},
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"A traveling businessman or tradesman."
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"(idiomatic, derogatory) A traveling businessman or tradesman."
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Download raw JSONL data for fly-by-night meaning in All languages combined (3.7kB)
This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable All languages combined dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2025-05-16 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2025-05-01 using wiktextract (142890b and 1d3fdbf). 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.