"how long is a piece of string" meaning in English

See how long is a piece of string in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Phrase

Audio: En-au-how long is a piece of string.ogg [Australia] Forms: How long is a piece of string [canonical]
Head templates: {{head|en|phrase|head=How long is a piece of string?}} How long is a piece of string?
  1. (colloquial, often humorous, rhetorical question) Used as a response to a question such as "How long will it take?" or "How big is it?" when the length or size is unknown, infinite, variable, or relative. Tags: colloquial, humorous, often, rhetoric Categories (topical): English rhetorical questions

Download JSON data for how long is a piece of string meaning in English (2.2kB)

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        "Used as a response to a question such as \"How long will it take?\" or \"How big is it?\" when the length or size is unknown, infinite, variable, or relative."
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        "(colloquial, often humorous, rhetorical question) Used as a response to a question such as \"How long will it take?\" or \"How big is it?\" when the length or size is unknown, infinite, variable, or relative."
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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 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.