See bad news bears in All languages combined, or Wiktionary
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"etymology_text": "Presumably a reference to the 1976 sports comedy film The Bad News Bears.",
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"pos": "proverb",
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"text": "I could tell by looking at him that he was bad news bears, so I avoided him for the rest of the school year.",
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"ref": "2015 August 14, Kristen Yoonsoo Kim, “This On-Set Fight Between Miles Teller and Josh Trank Is Probably More Exciting Than 'Fantastic Four'”, in Complex, retrieved 25 Nov 2015:",
"text": "When the actors admitted to not having seen the movie and even predicted it wouldn't be critically well-received, we knew it was going to be bad. And then we knew it was really bad news bears when its own director tweeted this.",
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"Said of someone or something that will bring disaster or bad fortune to one."
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"(idiomatic, US, sometimes capitalized) Said of someone or something that will bring disaster or bad fortune to one."
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Download raw JSONL data for bad news bears meaning in English (1.6kB)
This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2026-08-20 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2026-08-05 using wiktextract (872fc7b and 4deed51). 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.