"slender reed" meaning in All languages combined

See slender reed on Wiktionary

Noun [English]

Audio: En-au-slender reed.ogg [Australia] Forms: slender reeds [plural]
Head templates: {{en-noun}} slender reed (plural slender reeds)
  1. (idiomatic) A person, fact, or resource on which one can rely only to a limited extent. Tags: idiomatic
    Sense id: en-slender_reed-en-noun--pZPKNm~ Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header

Inflected forms

Download JSON data for slender reed meaning in All languages combined (2.3kB)

{
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "slender reeds",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {},
      "expansion": "slender reed (plural slender reeds)",
      "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": "1888, G. A. Henty, chapter 12, in In The Reign Of Terror",
          "text": "It was perfectly natural for you to think that a lad of eighteen was a slender reed to lean on in the time of trouble and danger.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1908, E. Phillips Oppenheim, chapter 35, in The Great Secret",
          "text": "\"It is a slender reed,\" Gilbert said, \"for so mighty an issue to rest upon.\"",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2009 September 28, Jeremy Warner, “Governments can survive recessions, but not in this case”, in Telegraph, UK, retrieved 2015-08-17",
          "text": "Yet these precedents offer no more than a slender reed for Gordon Brown, almost hopelessly down in the polls, to cling to.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2013 September 23, Lizette Alvarez, “Rubio Withdraws Support for Gay Black Judge’s Nomination to the Federal Bench”, in New York Times, retrieved 2015-08-17",
          "text": "The nomination of a gay black Miami judge to the federal bench will not move forward after Senator Marco Rubio announced he was withdrawing his support over concerns about the judge’s actions in two criminal cases. . . . “That is a slender reed for Senator Rubio to hang this on,” said Representative Alcee Hastings, Democrat of Florida, referring to the two court cases.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A person, fact, or resource on which one can rely only to a limited extent."
      ],
      "id": "en-slender_reed-en-noun--pZPKNm~",
      "links": [
        [
          "rely",
          "rely"
        ],
        [
          "limited",
          "limited"
        ]
      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(idiomatic) A person, fact, or resource on which one can rely only to a limited extent."
      ],
      "tags": [
        "idiomatic"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "sounds": [
    {
      "audio": "En-au-slender reed.ogg",
      "mp3_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/9/95/En-au-slender_reed.ogg/En-au-slender_reed.ogg.mp3",
      "ogg_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/95/En-au-slender_reed.ogg",
      "tags": [
        "Australia"
      ],
      "text": "Audio (AU)"
    }
  ],
  "word": "slender reed"
}
{
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "slender reeds",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {},
      "expansion": "slender reed (plural slender reeds)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        "English countable nouns",
        "English entries with incorrect language header",
        "English idioms",
        "English lemmas",
        "English multiword terms",
        "English nouns",
        "English terms with audio links",
        "English terms with quotations",
        "Quotation templates to be cleaned"
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "1888, G. A. Henty, chapter 12, in In The Reign Of Terror",
          "text": "It was perfectly natural for you to think that a lad of eighteen was a slender reed to lean on in the time of trouble and danger.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1908, E. Phillips Oppenheim, chapter 35, in The Great Secret",
          "text": "\"It is a slender reed,\" Gilbert said, \"for so mighty an issue to rest upon.\"",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2009 September 28, Jeremy Warner, “Governments can survive recessions, but not in this case”, in Telegraph, UK, retrieved 2015-08-17",
          "text": "Yet these precedents offer no more than a slender reed for Gordon Brown, almost hopelessly down in the polls, to cling to.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2013 September 23, Lizette Alvarez, “Rubio Withdraws Support for Gay Black Judge’s Nomination to the Federal Bench”, in New York Times, retrieved 2015-08-17",
          "text": "The nomination of a gay black Miami judge to the federal bench will not move forward after Senator Marco Rubio announced he was withdrawing his support over concerns about the judge’s actions in two criminal cases. . . . “That is a slender reed for Senator Rubio to hang this on,” said Representative Alcee Hastings, Democrat of Florida, referring to the two court cases.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A person, fact, or resource on which one can rely only to a limited extent."
      ],
      "links": [
        [
          "rely",
          "rely"
        ],
        [
          "limited",
          "limited"
        ]
      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(idiomatic) A person, fact, or resource on which one can rely only to a limited extent."
      ],
      "tags": [
        "idiomatic"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "sounds": [
    {
      "audio": "En-au-slender reed.ogg",
      "mp3_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/9/95/En-au-slender_reed.ogg/En-au-slender_reed.ogg.mp3",
      "ogg_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/95/En-au-slender_reed.ogg",
      "tags": [
        "Australia"
      ],
      "text": "Audio (AU)"
    }
  ],
  "word": "slender reed"
}

This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable All languages combined dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-06 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-05-02 using wiktextract (f4fd8c9 and c9440ce). 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.