See cross the streams in All languages combined, or Wiktionary
{
"etymology_text": "Allusion to the 1984 film Ghostbusters, in which the characters are warned not let the energy streams from their proton packs cross, in order to avoid a catastrophic explosion.",
"forms": [
{
"form": "crosses the streams",
"tags": [
"present",
"singular",
"third-person"
]
},
{
"form": "crossing the streams",
"tags": [
"participle",
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]
},
{
"form": "crossed the streams",
"tags": [
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]
},
{
"form": "crossed the streams",
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]
}
],
"head_templates": [
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"1": "cross<> the streams"
},
"expansion": "cross the streams (third-person singular simple present crosses the streams, present participle crossing the streams, simple past and past participle crossed the streams)",
"name": "en-verb"
}
],
"lang": "English",
"lang_code": "en",
"pos": "verb",
"senses": [
{
"categories": [
{
"kind": "other",
"name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
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],
"ref": "2011 March 15, Brian Solis, Engage!: The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 88:",
"text": "As we weave together our syndication and aggregation networks , we must remain acutely aware of each channel and where it sends or receives content to ensure that we don't cross the streams.",
"type": "quote"
},
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"ref": "2021 March 4, Devin Coldewey, “With $19M A round, Halo Dx combines data streams to better diagnose cancers, dementia and more”, in TechCrunch:",
"text": "Halo Diagnostics (or Dx for short) has raised a $19 million Series A to improve diagnosis of several serious illnesses by crossing the streams from multiple tests and making the improved process easily available to providers.",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"bold_text_offsets": [
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"ref": "2021 April 23, Marina Hyde, “Boris Johnson has a text addiction and it’s bad news for all of us”, in The Guardian:",
"text": "You could certainly leave it to Johnson to cross the streams of this week’s two biggest news stories – lobbying and football.",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"bold_text_offsets": [
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"ref": "2024 July 15, Kyle Barr, “This Free App Lets You Emulate Windows on Your iPhone”, in Gizmodo:",
"text": "Now, a new app on the App Store will allow you to run a virtual machine for Windows, Linux, and even macOS without jailbreaking your iPhone. Talk about crossing the streams.",
"type": "quote"
}
],
"glosses": [
"To bring together two very disparate things, or things that the speaker thinks should be kept separate."
],
"id": "en-cross_the_streams-en-verb-oGh35DxF",
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[
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],
"raw_glosses": [
"(colloquial, humorous) To bring together two very disparate things, or things that the speaker thinks should be kept separate."
],
"tags": [
"colloquial",
"humorous"
],
"wikipedia": [
"Ghostbusters",
"proton pack"
]
}
],
"word": "cross the streams"
}
{
"etymology_text": "Allusion to the 1984 film Ghostbusters, in which the characters are warned not let the energy streams from their proton packs cross, in order to avoid a catastrophic explosion.",
"forms": [
{
"form": "crosses the streams",
"tags": [
"present",
"singular",
"third-person"
]
},
{
"form": "crossing the streams",
"tags": [
"participle",
"present"
]
},
{
"form": "crossed the streams",
"tags": [
"participle",
"past"
]
},
{
"form": "crossed the streams",
"tags": [
"past"
]
}
],
"head_templates": [
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"args": {
"1": "cross<> the streams"
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"expansion": "cross the streams (third-person singular simple present crosses the streams, present participle crossing the streams, simple past and past participle crossed the streams)",
"name": "en-verb"
}
],
"lang": "English",
"lang_code": "en",
"pos": "verb",
"senses": [
{
"categories": [
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"English humorous terms",
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"examples": [
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172,
189
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],
"ref": "2011 March 15, Brian Solis, Engage!: The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 88:",
"text": "As we weave together our syndication and aggregation networks , we must remain acutely aware of each channel and where it sends or receives content to ensure that we don't cross the streams.",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"bold_text_offsets": [
[
122,
142
]
],
"ref": "2021 March 4, Devin Coldewey, “With $19M A round, Halo Dx combines data streams to better diagnose cancers, dementia and more”, in TechCrunch:",
"text": "Halo Diagnostics (or Dx for short) has raised a $19 million Series A to improve diagnosis of several serious illnesses by crossing the streams from multiple tests and making the improved process easily available to providers.",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"bold_text_offsets": [
[
43,
60
]
],
"ref": "2021 April 23, Marina Hyde, “Boris Johnson has a text addiction and it’s bad news for all of us”, in The Guardian:",
"text": "You could certainly leave it to Johnson to cross the streams of this week’s two biggest news stories – lobbying and football.",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"bold_text_offsets": [
[
152,
172
]
],
"ref": "2024 July 15, Kyle Barr, “This Free App Lets You Emulate Windows on Your iPhone”, in Gizmodo:",
"text": "Now, a new app on the App Store will allow you to run a virtual machine for Windows, Linux, and even macOS without jailbreaking your iPhone. Talk about crossing the streams.",
"type": "quote"
}
],
"glosses": [
"To bring together two very disparate things, or things that the speaker thinks should be kept separate."
],
"links": [
[
"humorous",
"humorous"
],
[
"disparate",
"disparate"
],
[
"speaker",
"speaker"
]
],
"raw_glosses": [
"(colloquial, humorous) To bring together two very disparate things, or things that the speaker thinks should be kept separate."
],
"tags": [
"colloquial",
"humorous"
],
"wikipedia": [
"Ghostbusters",
"proton pack"
]
}
],
"word": "cross the streams"
}
Download raw JSONL data for cross the streams meaning in English (3.0kB)
This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2025-08-18 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2025-08-02 using wiktextract (0c45963 and 3c020d2). 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.