See give them an inch and they'll take an ell in All languages combined, or Wiktionary
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"ref": "1546, John Heywood, chapter IX, in Julian Sharman, editor, The Proverbs of John Heywood. […], London: George Bell and Sons, […], published 1874, →OCLC, part II, page 161:",
"text": "I will yet thrive, (I say), as good is an ynch / As an ell. Yee can, (quoth shee), make it so well, / For when I gave you an inch, you tooke an ell, / Till both ell and inch be gone, and we in det.",
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"word": "give them an inch and they'll take an ell"
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Download raw JSONL data for give them an inch and they'll take an ell meaning in English (1.2kB)
This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2025-06-10 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2025-06-01 using wiktextract (58c391d and f1c2b61). 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.