"like a knife through butter" meaning in English

See like a knife through butter in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Prepositional phrase

Audio: En-au-like a knife through butter.ogg [Australia]
Head templates: {{head|en|prepositional phrase|head=}} like a knife through butter, {{en-PP}} like a knife through butter
  1. (simile) With great ease and effectiveness. Synonyms: like a hot knife through butter Translations (with great ease): kuin kuuma veitsi voihin (Finnish), wie durch Butter (note: only with verbs of cutting or passing through) (German)
    Sense id: en-like_a_knife_through_butter-en-prep_phrase-SbgeepIo Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header, English similes

Download JSON data for like a knife through butter meaning in English (1.5kB)

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        "2": "prepositional phrase",
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      "expansion": "like a knife through butter",
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    {
      "args": {},
      "expansion": "like a knife through butter",
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      "glosses": [
        "With great ease and effectiveness."
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      "qualifier": "simile",
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(simile) With great ease and effectiveness."
      ],
      "synonyms": [
        {
          "word": "like a hot knife through butter"
        }
      ],
      "translations": [
        {
          "code": "fi",
          "lang": "Finnish",
          "sense": "with great ease",
          "word": "kuin kuuma veitsi voihin"
        },
        {
          "code": "de",
          "lang": "German",
          "note": "only with verbs of cutting or passing through",
          "sense": "with great ease",
          "word": "wie durch Butter"
        }
      ]
    }
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  "sounds": [
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      "ogg_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a1/En-au-like_a_knife_through_butter.ogg",
      "tags": [
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      "text": "Audio (AU)"
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  "word": "like a knife through butter"
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        "With great ease and effectiveness."
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      ],
      "qualifier": "simile",
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(simile) With great ease and effectiveness."
      ],
      "synonyms": [
        {
          "word": "like a hot knife through butter"
        }
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  "translations": [
    {
      "code": "fi",
      "lang": "Finnish",
      "sense": "with great ease",
      "word": "kuin kuuma veitsi voihin"
    },
    {
      "code": "de",
      "lang": "German",
      "note": "only with verbs of cutting or passing through",
      "sense": "with great ease",
      "word": "wie durch Butter"
    }
  ],
  "word": "like a knife through butter"
}

This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-03 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.