"water off a duck's back" meaning in All languages combined

See water off a duck's back on Wiktionary

Noun [English]

Etymology: From the idea that water rolls easily off a duck's back and does not penetrate the duck's feathers. Head templates: {{en-noun|-}} water off a duck's back (uncountable)
  1. Something potentially harmful or hurtful, such as criticism or insult, that nevertheless has no effect or impact on the target. Tags: uncountable
    Sense id: en-water_off_a_duck's_back-en-noun-SLbw3MCR Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header

Alternative forms

Download JSON data for water off a duck's back meaning in All languages combined (0.8kB)

{
  "etymology_text": "From the idea that water rolls easily off a duck's back and does not penetrate the duck's feathers.",
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "-"
      },
      "expansion": "water off a duck's back (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": [
        {
          "text": "She's always going on at him about something, but to him it's all water off a duck's back."
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "Something potentially harmful or hurtful, such as criticism or insult, that nevertheless has no effect or impact on the target."
      ],
      "id": "en-water_off_a_duck's_back-en-noun-SLbw3MCR",
      "tags": [
        "uncountable"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "water off a duck's back"
}

{
  "etymology_text": "From the idea that water rolls easily off a duck's back and does not penetrate the duck's feathers.",
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "-"
      },
      "expansion": "water off a duck's back (uncountable)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        "English entries with incorrect language header",
        "English lemmas",
        "English multiword terms",
        "English nouns",
        "English uncountable nouns"
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "text": "She's always going on at him about something, but to him it's all water off a duck's back."
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "Something potentially harmful or hurtful, such as criticism or insult, that nevertheless has no effect or impact on the target."
      ],
      "tags": [
        "uncountable"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "water off a duck's back"
}

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.