"camel's nose" meaning in English

See camel's nose in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Audio: en-au-camel's nose.ogg [Australia] Forms: camels' noses [plural]
Etymology: The root phrase is usually claimed to be a saying of Arabs or Middle Eastern cultures, roughly as follows: : Do not allow a camel to put his nose under the edge of your tent, for soon you will have a camel in your tent. Head templates: {{en-noun|camels' noses}} camel's nose (plural camels' noses)
  1. (idiomatic) A situation where the permitting of some small act will lead to a larger undesirable act or circumstance. Tags: idiomatic Related terms: foot in the door, give them an inch and they'll take a mile, slippery slope, thin edge of the wedge

Download JSON data for camel's nose meaning in English (2.1kB)

{
  "etymology_text": "The root phrase is usually claimed to be a saying of Arabs or Middle Eastern cultures, roughly as follows:\n: Do not allow a camel to put his nose under the edge of your tent, for soon you will have a camel in your tent.",
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "camels' noses",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "camels' noses"
      },
      "expansion": "camel's nose (plural camels' noses)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English allusions",
          "parents": [],
          "source": "w"
        },
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          "parents": [
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          "parents": [
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        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A situation where the permitting of some small act will lead to a larger undesirable act or circumstance."
      ],
      "id": "en-camel's_nose-en-noun-cp0cymCs",
      "links": [
        [
          "permitting",
          "permitting"
        ],
        [
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        ],
        [
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        ],
        [
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        ],
        [
          "undesirable",
          "undesirable"
        ],
        [
          "circumstance",
          "circumstance"
        ]
      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(idiomatic) A situation where the permitting of some small act will lead to a larger undesirable act or circumstance."
      ],
      "related": [
        {
          "word": "foot in the door"
        },
        {
          "word": "give them an inch and they'll take a mile"
        },
        {
          "word": "slippery slope"
        },
        {
          "word": "thin edge of the wedge"
        }
      ],
      "tags": [
        "idiomatic"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "sounds": [
    {
      "audio": "en-au-camel's nose.ogg",
      "mp3_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/f/fb/En-au-camel%27s_nose.ogg/En-au-camel%27s_nose.ogg.mp3",
      "ogg_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fb/En-au-camel%27s_nose.ogg",
      "tags": [
        "Australia"
      ],
      "text": "Audio (AU)"
    }
  ],
  "word": "camel's nose"
}
{
  "etymology_text": "The root phrase is usually claimed to be a saying of Arabs or Middle Eastern cultures, roughly as follows:\n: Do not allow a camel to put his nose under the edge of your tent, for soon you will have a camel in your tent.",
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "camels' noses",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "camels' noses"
      },
      "expansion": "camel's nose (plural camels' noses)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "related": [
    {
      "word": "foot in the door"
    },
    {
      "word": "give them an inch and they'll take a mile"
    },
    {
      "word": "slippery slope"
    },
    {
      "word": "thin edge of the wedge"
    }
  ],
  "senses": [
    {
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        "English countable nouns",
        "English ellipses",
        "English entries with incorrect language header",
        "English entries with language name categories using raw markup",
        "English idioms",
        "English lemmas",
        "English multiword terms",
        "English nouns",
        "English terms with audio links",
        "English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys"
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A situation where the permitting of some small act will lead to a larger undesirable act or circumstance."
      ],
      "links": [
        [
          "permitting",
          "permitting"
        ],
        [
          "small",
          "small"
        ],
        [
          "act",
          "act"
        ],
        [
          "larger",
          "larger"
        ],
        [
          "undesirable",
          "undesirable"
        ],
        [
          "circumstance",
          "circumstance"
        ]
      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(idiomatic) A situation where the permitting of some small act will lead to a larger undesirable act or circumstance."
      ],
      "tags": [
        "idiomatic"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "sounds": [
    {
      "audio": "en-au-camel's nose.ogg",
      "mp3_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/f/fb/En-au-camel%27s_nose.ogg/En-au-camel%27s_nose.ogg.mp3",
      "ogg_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fb/En-au-camel%27s_nose.ogg",
      "tags": [
        "Australia"
      ],
      "text": "Audio (AU)"
    }
  ],
  "word": "camel's nose"
}

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.