"luck of the draw" meaning in All languages combined

See luck of the draw on Wiktionary

Noun [English]

Audio: En-au-luck of the draw.ogg [Australia]
Etymology: An allusion to the random manner in which playing cards are distributed or "drawn" in many card games. Head templates: {{en-noun|-}} luck of the draw (uncountable)
  1. (idiomatic) The random production of favorable or unfavorable results; chance. Tags: idiomatic, uncountable Synonyms: happenstance
    Sense id: en-luck_of_the_draw-en-noun-ssXw5d4A Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header

Download JSON data for luck of the draw meaning in All languages combined (2.0kB)

{
  "etymology_text": "An allusion to the random manner in which playing cards are distributed or \"drawn\" in many card games.",
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "-"
      },
      "expansion": "luck of the draw (uncountable)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
          "parents": [
            "Entries with incorrect language header",
            "Entry maintenance"
          ],
          "source": "w"
        }
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "1973, Sheila Sutcliffe, Martello Towers, page 63",
          "text": "[A] dry ditch or moat . . . should have been constructed around towers in particularly exposed or vulnerable positions but in some cases it seems that they were selected by the luck of the draw.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1996 May 21, Carey Goldberg, “Best-Selling Author, but Not at Home”, in New York Times, retrieved 2013-06-08",
          "text": "[I]s it merely the luck of the draw that turns some novels into blockbusters and others of equal merit into also-rans?",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2005 August 10, “What You Need to Know on Smoking and Lung Cancer”, in Time",
          "text": "If you've never been a smoker and you develop lung cancer, how did you get it? Is it genetics, environment, radon, luck of the draw?",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "The random production of favorable or unfavorable results; chance."
      ],
      "id": "en-luck_of_the_draw-en-noun-ssXw5d4A",
      "links": [
        [
          "random",
          "random"
        ],
        [
          "favorable",
          "favorable"
        ],
        [
          "unfavorable",
          "unfavorable"
        ],
        [
          "chance",
          "chance"
        ]
      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(idiomatic) The random production of favorable or unfavorable results; chance."
      ],
      "synonyms": [
        {
          "word": "happenstance"
        }
      ],
      "tags": [
        "idiomatic",
        "uncountable"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "sounds": [
    {
      "audio": "En-au-luck of the draw.ogg",
      "mp3_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/a/aa/En-au-luck_of_the_draw.ogg/En-au-luck_of_the_draw.ogg.mp3",
      "ogg_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/En-au-luck_of_the_draw.ogg",
      "tags": [
        "Australia"
      ],
      "text": "Audio (AU)"
    }
  ],
  "word": "luck of the draw"
}
{
  "etymology_text": "An allusion to the random manner in which playing cards are distributed or \"drawn\" in many card games.",
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "-"
      },
      "expansion": "luck of the draw (uncountable)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        "English entries with incorrect language header",
        "English idioms",
        "English lemmas",
        "English multiword terms",
        "English nouns",
        "English terms with audio links",
        "English terms with quotations",
        "English uncountable nouns"
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "1973, Sheila Sutcliffe, Martello Towers, page 63",
          "text": "[A] dry ditch or moat . . . should have been constructed around towers in particularly exposed or vulnerable positions but in some cases it seems that they were selected by the luck of the draw.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1996 May 21, Carey Goldberg, “Best-Selling Author, but Not at Home”, in New York Times, retrieved 2013-06-08",
          "text": "[I]s it merely the luck of the draw that turns some novels into blockbusters and others of equal merit into also-rans?",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2005 August 10, “What You Need to Know on Smoking and Lung Cancer”, in Time",
          "text": "If you've never been a smoker and you develop lung cancer, how did you get it? Is it genetics, environment, radon, luck of the draw?",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "The random production of favorable or unfavorable results; chance."
      ],
      "links": [
        [
          "random",
          "random"
        ],
        [
          "favorable",
          "favorable"
        ],
        [
          "unfavorable",
          "unfavorable"
        ],
        [
          "chance",
          "chance"
        ]
      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(idiomatic) The random production of favorable or unfavorable results; chance."
      ],
      "tags": [
        "idiomatic",
        "uncountable"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "sounds": [
    {
      "audio": "En-au-luck of the draw.ogg",
      "mp3_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/a/aa/En-au-luck_of_the_draw.ogg/En-au-luck_of_the_draw.ogg.mp3",
      "ogg_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/En-au-luck_of_the_draw.ogg",
      "tags": [
        "Australia"
      ],
      "text": "Audio (AU)"
    }
  ],
  "synonyms": [
    {
      "word": "happenstance"
    }
  ],
  "word": "luck of the draw"
}

This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable All languages combined dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-10 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-05-02 using wiktextract (a644e18 and edd475d). 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.