"check is in the mail" meaning in English

See check is in the mail in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Phrase

Audio: en-au-check is in the mail.ogg [Australia]
Head templates: {{head|en|phrase}} check is in the mail
  1. (idiomatic, often ironic) A common excuse used by debtors to put off creditors Tags: idiomatic, ironic, often

Download JSON data for check is in the mail meaning in English (2.3kB)

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      "expansion": "check is in the mail",
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      "examples": [
        {
          "text": "Your check is in the mail. I gave it to my son to mail yesterday. I hope he remembered."
        },
        {
          "ref": "1989, Ceramics Monthly, page 77",
          "text": "The reply was usually either a story about financial problems, or the \"check is in the mail\" dodge.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1992, Donald L. Barlett with James B. Steele, America: What Went Wrong?, page 155",
          "text": "It was the sure-fire sign of a business — or an individual — in financial distress: The old check-is-in-the-mail ploy.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1997, Jeff Davidson, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Assertiveness, page 306",
          "text": "The person with whom you speak may be well schooled in the \"check is in the mail\" run-around.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A common excuse used by debtors to put off creditors"
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      "id": "en-check_is_in_the_mail-en-phrase--pj6jinf",
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        [
          "excuse",
          "excuse#English"
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        [
          "debtor",
          "debtor#English"
        ],
        [
          "creditor",
          "creditor#English"
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        "(idiomatic, often ironic) A common excuse used by debtors to put off creditors"
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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 2024-05-05 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.