"best laid plans" meaning in English

See best laid plans in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Audio: en-au-best laid plans.ogg [Australia] Forms: best laid plan [singular]
Etymology: Shortened form of “the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry”, translated from Scots “The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men, / Gang aft agley,” from To A Mouse, On Turning Her Up In Her Nest With The Plough by Robert Burns (text and reading of poem). Etymology templates: {{der|en|sco|-}} Scots Head templates: {{head|en|noun|singular|best laid plan}} best laid plans (singular best laid plan)
  1. (idiomatic) A proverbial expression used to signify the futility of making detailed plans when the ability to fully or even partially execute them is uncertain. Wikipedia link: Robert Burns, To a Mouse Tags: idiomatic

Download JSON data for best laid plans meaning in English (2.3kB)

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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.