See keep the ball rolling in All languages combined, or Wiktionary
{
"forms": [
{
"form": "keeps the ball rolling",
"tags": [
"present",
"singular",
"third-person"
]
},
{
"form": "keeping the ball rolling",
"tags": [
"participle",
"present"
]
},
{
"form": "kept the ball rolling",
"tags": [
"participle",
"past"
]
},
{
"form": "kept the ball rolling",
"tags": [
"past"
]
}
],
"head_templates": [
{
"args": {
"1": "keep<,,kept> the ball rolling"
},
"expansion": "keep the ball rolling (third-person singular simple present keeps the ball rolling, present participle keeping the ball rolling, simple past and past participle kept the ball rolling)",
"name": "en-verb"
}
],
"lang": "English",
"lang_code": "en",
"pos": "verb",
"senses": [
{
"categories": [
{
"kind": "other",
"name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
"parents": [
"Entries with incorrect language header",
"Entry maintenance"
],
"source": "w"
},
{
"kind": "other",
"name": "Entries with translation boxes",
"parents": [],
"source": "w"
},
{
"kind": "other",
"name": "Pages with 1 entry",
"parents": [],
"source": "w"
},
{
"kind": "other",
"name": "Pages with entries",
"parents": [],
"source": "w"
},
{
"kind": "other",
"name": "Terms with Finnish translations",
"parents": [],
"source": "w"
},
{
"kind": "other",
"name": "Terms with Polish translations",
"parents": [],
"source": "w"
}
],
"examples": [
{
"ref": "1913, Joseph Conrad, chapter 1, in Chance:",
"text": "Then there was a pause. Our new acquaintance had become involved in a vexatious difficulty with his pipe. . . . To keep the ball rolling I asked Marlow if this Powell was remarkable in any way.",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"ref": "1988 June 10, Isadore Barmash, “Market Place; Can the Gap Be On the Rebound?”, in New York Times, retrieved 2017-11-16:",
"text": "But the Gap has a long way to go before it climbs back to its high of $77. . . . Lately, it has been moving back up, closing yesterday at $26.375. On Wednesday, Donald G. Fisher, chairman and chief executive of the Gap, and Millard S. Drexler, president, will try to keep the ball rolling when they talk to New York securities analysts.",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"ref": "2001 June 14, Sally Donnelly, “A Smart FAA Plan to Reduce Airport Congestion”, in Time, retrieved 2017-11-16:",
"text": "Few people thought the Federal Aviation Administration could, as it promised, solve the delay problem at New York's LaGuardia Airport in six months. . . . Plavin, and others, hope the FAA will keep the ball rolling at the other top ten delay-plagued airports in the country.",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"ref": "2023 March 1, Rachel Ellison, “Bad Dates Turn Out to Be Excellent on TikTok”, in The New York Times:",
"text": "The video accrued tens of thousands of views overnight. Four days later, inspired to keep the ball rolling, she made another about the same date. It’s since been viewed 4.2 million times.",
"type": "quote"
}
],
"glosses": [
"To continue an action indicated in the context; to sustain a process."
],
"id": "en-keep_the_ball_rolling-en-verb-cl5n8vlq",
"links": [
[
"continue",
"continue"
],
[
"action",
"action"
],
[
"sustain",
"sustain"
]
],
"raw_glosses": [
"(idiomatic) To continue an action indicated in the context; to sustain a process."
],
"related": [
{
"word": "get the ball rolling"
}
],
"tags": [
"idiomatic"
],
"translations": [
{
"code": "fi",
"lang": "Finnish",
"sense": "Translations",
"word": "pitää pyörät pyörimässä"
},
{
"code": "pl",
"lang": "Polish",
"sense": "Translations",
"tags": [
"imperfective"
],
"word": "podtrzymywać"
},
{
"code": "pl",
"lang": "Polish",
"sense": "Translations",
"tags": [
"perfective"
],
"word": "podtrzymać"
}
]
}
],
"sounds": [
{
"audio": "En-au-keep the ball rolling.ogg",
"mp3_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/b/b3/En-au-keep_the_ball_rolling.ogg/En-au-keep_the_ball_rolling.ogg.mp3",
"ogg_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b3/En-au-keep_the_ball_rolling.ogg"
}
],
"word": "keep the ball rolling"
}
{
"forms": [
{
"form": "keeps the ball rolling",
"tags": [
"present",
"singular",
"third-person"
]
},
{
"form": "keeping the ball rolling",
"tags": [
"participle",
"present"
]
},
{
"form": "kept the ball rolling",
"tags": [
"participle",
"past"
]
},
{
"form": "kept the ball rolling",
"tags": [
"past"
]
}
],
"head_templates": [
{
"args": {
"1": "keep<,,kept> the ball rolling"
},
"expansion": "keep the ball rolling (third-person singular simple present keeps the ball rolling, present participle keeping the ball rolling, simple past and past participle kept the ball rolling)",
"name": "en-verb"
}
],
"lang": "English",
"lang_code": "en",
"pos": "verb",
"related": [
{
"word": "get the ball rolling"
}
],
"senses": [
{
"categories": [
"English entries with incorrect language header",
"English idioms",
"English lemmas",
"English multiword terms",
"English terms with quotations",
"English verbs",
"Entries with translation boxes",
"Pages with 1 entry",
"Pages with entries",
"Quotation templates to be cleaned",
"Terms with Finnish translations",
"Terms with Polish translations",
"Translation table header lacks gloss"
],
"examples": [
{
"ref": "1913, Joseph Conrad, chapter 1, in Chance:",
"text": "Then there was a pause. Our new acquaintance had become involved in a vexatious difficulty with his pipe. . . . To keep the ball rolling I asked Marlow if this Powell was remarkable in any way.",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"ref": "1988 June 10, Isadore Barmash, “Market Place; Can the Gap Be On the Rebound?”, in New York Times, retrieved 2017-11-16:",
"text": "But the Gap has a long way to go before it climbs back to its high of $77. . . . Lately, it has been moving back up, closing yesterday at $26.375. On Wednesday, Donald G. Fisher, chairman and chief executive of the Gap, and Millard S. Drexler, president, will try to keep the ball rolling when they talk to New York securities analysts.",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"ref": "2001 June 14, Sally Donnelly, “A Smart FAA Plan to Reduce Airport Congestion”, in Time, retrieved 2017-11-16:",
"text": "Few people thought the Federal Aviation Administration could, as it promised, solve the delay problem at New York's LaGuardia Airport in six months. . . . Plavin, and others, hope the FAA will keep the ball rolling at the other top ten delay-plagued airports in the country.",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"ref": "2023 March 1, Rachel Ellison, “Bad Dates Turn Out to Be Excellent on TikTok”, in The New York Times:",
"text": "The video accrued tens of thousands of views overnight. Four days later, inspired to keep the ball rolling, she made another about the same date. It’s since been viewed 4.2 million times.",
"type": "quote"
}
],
"glosses": [
"To continue an action indicated in the context; to sustain a process."
],
"links": [
[
"continue",
"continue"
],
[
"action",
"action"
],
[
"sustain",
"sustain"
]
],
"raw_glosses": [
"(idiomatic) To continue an action indicated in the context; to sustain a process."
],
"tags": [
"idiomatic"
]
}
],
"sounds": [
{
"audio": "En-au-keep the ball rolling.ogg",
"mp3_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/b/b3/En-au-keep_the_ball_rolling.ogg/En-au-keep_the_ball_rolling.ogg.mp3",
"ogg_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b3/En-au-keep_the_ball_rolling.ogg"
}
],
"translations": [
{
"code": "fi",
"lang": "Finnish",
"sense": "Translations",
"word": "pitää pyörät pyörimässä"
},
{
"code": "pl",
"lang": "Polish",
"sense": "Translations",
"tags": [
"imperfective"
],
"word": "podtrzymywać"
},
{
"code": "pl",
"lang": "Polish",
"sense": "Translations",
"tags": [
"perfective"
],
"word": "podtrzymać"
}
],
"word": "keep the ball rolling"
}
Download raw JSONL data for keep the ball rolling meaning in English (3.5kB)
This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2025-01-18 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2025-01-01 using wiktextract (e4a2c88 and 4230888). 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.