"get away with murder" meaning in English

See get away with murder in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Verb

Audio: en-au-get away with murder.ogg Forms: gets away with murder [present, singular, third-person], getting away with murder [participle, present], got away with murder [past], got away with murder [UK, participle, past], gotten away with murder [US, participle, past]
Head templates: {{en-verb|get<,,got,got􂀿UK􂁀:gotten􂀿US􂁀> away with murder|head=get away with murder}} get away with murder (third-person singular simple present gets away with murder, present participle getting away with murder, simple past got away with murder, past participle (UK) got away with murder or (US) gotten away with murder)
  1. (hyperbolic) To do something bad or illegal and escape the punishment that others would receive. Tags: excessive Translations (to do something bad or illegal and not be punished): вы́йти сухи́м из воды́ (výjti suxím iz vodý) (english: to get dry out of the water) (Russian)

Inflected forms

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          "ref": "1984, James Purdy, On Glory's Course, Viking Press, →ISBN, page 147:",
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          "text": "He said I found out about everything he did and said, 'I can't get away with nothing, and Jim can get away with murder.' I don't think that I let any of my kids get away with murder, and I don't think any one of them ever did much serious mischief.",
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          "text": "And what do you say to someone who might be on the left, who’d be listening to this conversation and would say: Oh look, Bannon is absolutely right. There was a financial crisis. Wall Street got away with murder.",
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        "(hyperbolic) To do something bad or illegal and escape the punishment that others would receive."
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          "english": "to get dry out of the water",
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          "roman": "výjti suxím iz vodý",
          "sense": "to do something bad or illegal and not be punished",
          "word": "вы́йти сухи́м из воды́"
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            ]
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          "text": "He said I found out about everything he did and said, 'I can't get away with nothing, and Jim can get away with murder.' I don't think that I let any of my kids get away with murder, and I don't think any one of them ever did much serious mischief.",
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      "glosses": [
        "To do something bad or illegal and escape the punishment that others would receive."
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        "(hyperbolic) To do something bad or illegal and escape the punishment that others would receive."
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      "english": "to get dry out of the water",
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      "roman": "výjti suxím iz vodý",
      "sense": "to do something bad or illegal and not be punished",
      "word": "вы́йти сухи́м из воды́"
    }
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  "word": "get away with murder"
}

Download raw JSONL data for get away with murder meaning in English (3.7kB)

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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 2025-04-29 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2025-04-20 using wiktextract (4eaa824 and ea19a0a). 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.