like breaking sticks in English

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{
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "prep_phrase",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
          "parents": [],
          "source": "w"
        },
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "Pages with 1 entry",
          "parents": [],
          "source": "w"
        },
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "Pages with entries",
          "parents": [],
          "source": "w"
        }
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "bold_text_offsets": [
            [
              199,
              219
            ]
          ],
          "ref": "1944, Damon Runyon, The Lacework Kid:",
          "text": "Well, Schultz is around after me again that night to take me to the house in the grove, and in fact every night for a month hand-running I play the captain and it is not long before I am beating him like breaking sticks.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "Without any difficulty."
      ],
      "id": "en-like_breaking_sticks-en-prep_phrase-vqQMrl~x",
      "links": [
        [
          "difficulty",
          "difficulty"
        ]
      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(informal) Without any difficulty."
      ],
      "synonyms": [
        {
          "word": "like taking candy from a baby"
        }
      ],
      "tags": [
        "informal"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "like breaking sticks"
}

[Show JSON for raw wiktextract data ▼] [Hide JSON for raw wiktextract data ▲]

{
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "prep_phrase",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        "English entries with incorrect language header",
        "English informal terms",
        "English lemmas",
        "English multiword terms",
        "English prepositional phrases",
        "English terms with quotations",
        "Pages with 1 entry",
        "Pages with entries",
        "Quotation templates to be cleaned"
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "bold_text_offsets": [
            [
              199,
              219
            ]
          ],
          "ref": "1944, Damon Runyon, The Lacework Kid:",
          "text": "Well, Schultz is around after me again that night to take me to the house in the grove, and in fact every night for a month hand-running I play the captain and it is not long before I am beating him like breaking sticks.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "Without any difficulty."
      ],
      "links": [
        [
          "difficulty",
          "difficulty"
        ]
      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(informal) Without any difficulty."
      ],
      "synonyms": [
        {
          "word": "like taking candy from a baby"
        }
      ],
      "tags": [
        "informal"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "like breaking sticks"
}

This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2026-09-09 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2026-09-02 using wiktextract (ccec6f1 and 4deed51). 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.

"like breaking sticks" meaning in English

Prepositional phrase