"honest John" meaning in English

See honest John in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Forms: honest Johns [plural]
Head templates: {{en-noun}} honest John (plural honest Johns)
  1. (idiomatic) An ordinary, honest, member of the public Tags: idiomatic
    Sense id: en-honest_John-en-noun-opNsg~oq Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header

Inflected forms

Download JSON data for honest John meaning in English (1.0kB)

{
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "honest Johns",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {},
      "expansion": "honest John (plural honest Johns)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
          "parents": [
            "Entries with incorrect language header",
            "Entry maintenance"
          ],
          "source": "w"
        }
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "2020 September 1, Tom Lamont, “The butcher's shop that lasted 300 years (give or take)”, in The Guardian",
          "text": "The high street was a place of utility once, with concentrated amenities. It was a place of wildly fluctuating codes of behaviour and scruples. Particular smells. Finicky proprietors. Honest johns. Crooks.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "An ordinary, honest, member of the public"
      ],
      "id": "en-honest_John-en-noun-opNsg~oq",
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(idiomatic) An ordinary, honest, member of the public"
      ],
      "tags": [
        "idiomatic"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "honest John"
}
{
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "honest Johns",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {},
      "expansion": "honest John (plural honest Johns)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        "English countable nouns",
        "English entries with incorrect language header",
        "English idioms",
        "English lemmas",
        "English multiword terms",
        "English nouns",
        "English terms with quotations"
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "2020 September 1, Tom Lamont, “The butcher's shop that lasted 300 years (give or take)”, in The Guardian",
          "text": "The high street was a place of utility once, with concentrated amenities. It was a place of wildly fluctuating codes of behaviour and scruples. Particular smells. Finicky proprietors. Honest johns. Crooks.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "An ordinary, honest, member of the public"
      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(idiomatic) An ordinary, honest, member of the public"
      ],
      "tags": [
        "idiomatic"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "honest John"
}

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.

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.