See all dressed up and nowhere to go in All languages combined, or Wiktionary
Download JSON data for all dressed up and nowhere to go meaning in English (3.4kB)
{
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"2": "adjective",
"head": "all dressed up and nowhere to go"
},
"expansion": "all dressed up and nowhere to go",
"name": "head"
}
],
"lang": "English",
"lang_code": "en",
"pos": "adj",
"senses": [
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"kind": "other",
"name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
"parents": [
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"examples": [
{
"ref": "1924 December 1, the musical \"Lady, Be Good!,\" premiered on Broadway at the Liberty Theatre; music by George Gershwin, lyrics by Ira Gershwin. Therein, the introductory verse to the song \"Oh, Lady be Good!\" includes the lyric",
"text": "Listen to my tale of woe, It's terribly sad but true. All dressed up, no place to go, Each evening I'm awfully blue."
},
{
"ref": "1929 April 9, “All Dressed Up, No Place to Go; Rebels Problem”, in Ellensburg Daily Record, retrieved 2013-03-09, page 1",
"text": "General Fauso Topete's troops, encamped south of here and faced with the impossible problem of how to attack the federal garrison without firing into Naco Ariz., virtually were in the position of soldiers all dressed up and nowhere to go.",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "1980 December 23, “Reagan's Advisers Split over 'Emergency' Idea”, in Vancouver Sun, Canada, retrieved 2013-03-09, page E3",
"text": "\"If you declare an emergency, you must have policies to carry out,\" adds Stein. \"Otherwise you're like a man without a ticket — all dressed up and nowhere to go.\"",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "2003 March 20, Meenakshi Ganguly, “Opening Night Aboard the U.S.S. Constellation”, in Time",
"text": "For the sailors aboard this aircraft carrier, war preparations had flipped into high gear. . . . By 4 a.m., when the deadline passed, orders to begin the assault had still not come down the ranks. For many of the commanders at sea, it was a classic \"all dressed up and nowhere to go\" scenario.",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "2004 August 8, Mike Turner, “Sailing: Harrison's day in calm before storm”, in The Independent, UK, retrieved 2013-03-09",
"text": "All dressed up and nowhere to go, nearly 7,000 competitors in almost 1,000 yachts were left drifting around in the central Solent yesterday.",
"type": "quotation"
}
],
"glosses": [
"Elaborately attired or otherwise fully prepared for an anticipated situation or activity which, nevertheless, fails to occur."
],
"id": "en-all_dressed_up_and_nowhere_to_go-en-adj-uWFAlcNx",
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"raw_glosses": [
"(idiomatic) Elaborately attired or otherwise fully prepared for an anticipated situation or activity which, nevertheless, fails to occur."
],
"synonyms": [
{
"word": "confounded"
},
{
"word": "stymied"
},
{
"word": "all dressed up and no place to go"
},
{
"word": "all dressed up with no place to go"
},
{
"word": "all dressed up with nowhere to go"
}
],
"tags": [
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"ogg_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e4/En-au-all_dressed_up_and_nowhere_to_go.ogg",
"tags": [
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"word": "all dressed up and nowhere to go"
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{
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"lang_code": "en",
"pos": "adj",
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"examples": [
{
"ref": "1924 December 1, the musical \"Lady, Be Good!,\" premiered on Broadway at the Liberty Theatre; music by George Gershwin, lyrics by Ira Gershwin. Therein, the introductory verse to the song \"Oh, Lady be Good!\" includes the lyric",
"text": "Listen to my tale of woe, It's terribly sad but true. All dressed up, no place to go, Each evening I'm awfully blue."
},
{
"ref": "1929 April 9, “All Dressed Up, No Place to Go; Rebels Problem”, in Ellensburg Daily Record, retrieved 2013-03-09, page 1",
"text": "General Fauso Topete's troops, encamped south of here and faced with the impossible problem of how to attack the federal garrison without firing into Naco Ariz., virtually were in the position of soldiers all dressed up and nowhere to go.",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "1980 December 23, “Reagan's Advisers Split over 'Emergency' Idea”, in Vancouver Sun, Canada, retrieved 2013-03-09, page E3",
"text": "\"If you declare an emergency, you must have policies to carry out,\" adds Stein. \"Otherwise you're like a man without a ticket — all dressed up and nowhere to go.\"",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "2003 March 20, Meenakshi Ganguly, “Opening Night Aboard the U.S.S. Constellation”, in Time",
"text": "For the sailors aboard this aircraft carrier, war preparations had flipped into high gear. . . . By 4 a.m., when the deadline passed, orders to begin the assault had still not come down the ranks. For many of the commanders at sea, it was a classic \"all dressed up and nowhere to go\" scenario.",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "2004 August 8, Mike Turner, “Sailing: Harrison's day in calm before storm”, in The Independent, UK, retrieved 2013-03-09",
"text": "All dressed up and nowhere to go, nearly 7,000 competitors in almost 1,000 yachts were left drifting around in the central Solent yesterday.",
"type": "quotation"
}
],
"glosses": [
"Elaborately attired or otherwise fully prepared for an anticipated situation or activity which, nevertheless, fails to occur."
],
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[
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],
[
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]
],
"raw_glosses": [
"(idiomatic) Elaborately attired or otherwise fully prepared for an anticipated situation or activity which, nevertheless, fails to occur."
],
"tags": [
"idiomatic"
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}
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"mp3_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/e/e4/En-au-all_dressed_up_and_nowhere_to_go.ogg/En-au-all_dressed_up_and_nowhere_to_go.ogg.mp3",
"ogg_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e4/En-au-all_dressed_up_and_nowhere_to_go.ogg",
"tags": [
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"synonyms": [
{
"word": "confounded"
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{
"word": "stymied"
},
{
"word": "all dressed up and no place to go"
},
{
"word": "all dressed up with no place to go"
},
{
"word": "all dressed up with nowhere to go"
}
],
"word": "all dressed up and nowhere to go"
}
This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-03 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.