"like a ton of bricks" meaning in English

See like a ton of bricks in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Prepositional phrase

Audio: En-au-like a ton of bricks.ogg [Australia]
Head templates: {{head|en|prepositional phrase|head=like a ton of bricks}} like a ton of bricks
  1. (simile, colloquial) Very strongly; very heavily; often unexpectedly. Tags: colloquial Categories (topical): Bricks Related terms: hit like a ton of bricks

Download JSON data for like a ton of bricks meaning in English (2.5kB)

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            "Engineering",
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            "Human activity",
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        {
          "ref": "1884 February 2, Punch, page 52",
          "text": "The Defendant then came down on me like a ton of bricks, as my eye will prove.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2000, United States Senate, The Boomers are Coming: The Challenge of Family Caregiving : Hearing Before the Special Committee on Aging, United States Senate, One Hundred Sixth Congress, First Session, Monroe, LA, October 11, 1999, page 34",
          "text": "Senator Breaux: Did you see this coming on gradually, or did it hit you all of a sudden like a ton of bricks?",
          "type": "quotation"
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        "Very strongly; very heavily; often unexpectedly."
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          "heavily",
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        "(simile, colloquial) Very strongly; very heavily; often unexpectedly."
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        "(simile, colloquial) Very strongly; very heavily; often unexpectedly."
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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 2024-04-22 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-04-21 using wiktextract (fc4f0c7 and c937495). 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.