"before you can say Jack Robinson" meaning in English

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Phrase

Etymology: Uncertain. There is some speculation that this is a reference to Sir John Robinson, the Lieutenant of the Tower of London from 1660 to 1680 and Lord Mayor of London in 1662, but there is nothing known about him that is associated with speed (Samuel Pepys called him as “a talking bragging bufflehead.”), and the phrase does not appear in print until 1778. Etymology templates: {{unc|en}} Uncertain Head templates: {{head|en|phrase}} before you can say Jack Robinson
  1. Very quickly; quicker than one expects. Synonyms: before you can say knife, in the twinkling of an eye, in two shakes of a lamb's tail, quick as anything, quick as a flash, quick as a fox, quick as lightning

Download JSON data for before you can say Jack Robinson meaning in English (2.3kB)

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          "word": "in two shakes of a lamb's tail"
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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-01 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-04-21 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.