"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 , LL-Q1860 (eng)-Naomi Persephone Amethyst (NaomiAmethyst)-like a ton of bricks.wav
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 Related terms: hit like a ton of bricks
    Sense id: en-like_a_ton_of_bricks-en-prep_phrase-vwqKBvK6 Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header, English similes, Pages with 1 entry, Pages with entries, Bricks
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      "examples": [
        {
          "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": "quote"
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          "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, →ISBN, 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?",
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          "ref": "2009 October 29, David Walliams [pseudonym; David Edward Williams], Mr Stink, London: HarperCollins Children’s Books, →ISBN:",
          "text": "“I still feel so bad about that. I fell for you like a ton of bricks when I first saw you onstage with the band.[…]\"",
          "type": "quote"
        }
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        "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 2025-05-13 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2025-05-01 using wiktextract (9a214a4 and 1b6da77). 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.