"coat-trailing" meaning in English

See coat-trailing in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Forms: coat-trailings [plural]
Etymology: From the idea of deliberately trailing one's coat on the ground to entice another to step on it. Head templates: {{en-noun|~}} coat-trailing (countable and uncountable, plural coat-trailings)
  1. (UK) A disingenuous act or arrangement intended to provoke a desired response. Tags: UK, countable, uncountable
    Sense id: en-coat-trailing-en-noun-72z3VT04 Categories (other): British English, English entries with incorrect language header

Inflected forms

Alternative forms

Download JSON data for coat-trailing meaning in English (3.0kB)

{
  "etymology_text": "From the idea of deliberately trailing one's coat on the ground to entice another to step on it.",
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "coat-trailings",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "~"
      },
      "expansion": "coat-trailing (countable and uncountable, plural coat-trailings)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "British English",
          "parents": [],
          "source": "w"
        },
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
          "parents": [
            "Entries with incorrect language header",
            "Entry maintenance"
          ],
          "source": "w"
        }
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "1904, Septimus Smet Thorburn, The Punjab in Peace and War, page 348",
          "text": "The Peshawar agent will often be an ambitious man \"in a hurry,\" in which case he will push the forward policy, and amongst future Viceroys Aucklands, Lyttons, Lansdownes, and Elgins will be more frequent than Lawrences and Curzons, and then we shall have complications, coat-trailings, warlike movements, perhaps even wars, and they mean, as was the case through the 'nineties, extravagance trans-Indus, and crippling retrenchments or tax enhancements cis-Indus.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1962, Northern Ireland Parliament Senate, Parliamentary Debates. The Senate Official Report, page 504",
          "text": "It would still remain a perfectly good Bill without the Clause. Its presence in it is nothing but what I said earlier, namely, a typical example of coat-trailing.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1983, Northern Ireland Assembly, Official Report of Debates - Issue 8, page 118",
          "text": "I am not prepared to be involved or drawn into a controversy on the one hand with those who proposed to abolish the name in a coat-trailing political exercise or on the other hand with those who rose to that bait and opposed the decision to try to change the name, equally for reasons of political opportunism and coat-trailing.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2006, Peter Hinchcliffe, John T. Ducker, Maria Holt, Without Glory in Arabia: The British Retreat from Aden, page 182",
          "text": "My own coat-trailing was totally ineffective, but the system of having an obvious road black, with 'cut-offs' behind and down side streets to catch those deliberately avoiding them proved useful.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2016, Barton Whaley, Turnabout and Deception",
          "text": "It was an Abwehr tradition for each of its officers to recruit his own agents. British M.I.6, who were responsible for the planting, obviously failed to do their coat-trailing either in the right places or with the right Abwehr officers.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A disingenuous act or arrangement intended to provoke a desired response."
      ],
      "id": "en-coat-trailing-en-noun-72z3VT04",
      "links": [
        [
          "disingenuous",
          "disingenuous"
        ],
        [
          "provoke",
          "provoke"
        ]
      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(UK) A disingenuous act or arrangement intended to provoke a desired response."
      ],
      "tags": [
        "UK",
        "countable",
        "uncountable"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "coat-trailing"
}
{
  "etymology_text": "From the idea of deliberately trailing one's coat on the ground to entice another to step on it.",
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "coat-trailings",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "~"
      },
      "expansion": "coat-trailing (countable and uncountable, plural coat-trailings)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        "British English",
        "English countable nouns",
        "English entries with incorrect language header",
        "English lemmas",
        "English multiword terms",
        "English nouns",
        "English terms with quotations",
        "English uncountable nouns"
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "1904, Septimus Smet Thorburn, The Punjab in Peace and War, page 348",
          "text": "The Peshawar agent will often be an ambitious man \"in a hurry,\" in which case he will push the forward policy, and amongst future Viceroys Aucklands, Lyttons, Lansdownes, and Elgins will be more frequent than Lawrences and Curzons, and then we shall have complications, coat-trailings, warlike movements, perhaps even wars, and they mean, as was the case through the 'nineties, extravagance trans-Indus, and crippling retrenchments or tax enhancements cis-Indus.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1962, Northern Ireland Parliament Senate, Parliamentary Debates. The Senate Official Report, page 504",
          "text": "It would still remain a perfectly good Bill without the Clause. Its presence in it is nothing but what I said earlier, namely, a typical example of coat-trailing.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1983, Northern Ireland Assembly, Official Report of Debates - Issue 8, page 118",
          "text": "I am not prepared to be involved or drawn into a controversy on the one hand with those who proposed to abolish the name in a coat-trailing political exercise or on the other hand with those who rose to that bait and opposed the decision to try to change the name, equally for reasons of political opportunism and coat-trailing.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2006, Peter Hinchcliffe, John T. Ducker, Maria Holt, Without Glory in Arabia: The British Retreat from Aden, page 182",
          "text": "My own coat-trailing was totally ineffective, but the system of having an obvious road black, with 'cut-offs' behind and down side streets to catch those deliberately avoiding them proved useful.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2016, Barton Whaley, Turnabout and Deception",
          "text": "It was an Abwehr tradition for each of its officers to recruit his own agents. British M.I.6, who were responsible for the planting, obviously failed to do their coat-trailing either in the right places or with the right Abwehr officers.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A disingenuous act or arrangement intended to provoke a desired response."
      ],
      "links": [
        [
          "disingenuous",
          "disingenuous"
        ],
        [
          "provoke",
          "provoke"
        ]
      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(UK) A disingenuous act or arrangement intended to provoke a desired response."
      ],
      "tags": [
        "UK",
        "countable",
        "uncountable"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "coat-trailing"
}

This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-06 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.

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