"make a pig's ear of" meaning in English

See make a pig's ear of in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Verb

Audio: En-au-make a pig's ear of.ogg [Australia] Forms: makes a pig's ear of [present, singular, third-person], making a pig's ear of [participle, present], made a pig's ear of [participle, past], made a pig's ear of [past]
Head templates: {{en-verb|make<,,made> a pig's ear of}} make a pig's ear of (third-person singular simple present makes a pig's ear of, present participle making a pig's ear of, simple past and past participle made a pig's ear of)
  1. (British, idiomatic, transitive) To do badly; to make a mess of. Tags: British, idiomatic, transitive Related terms: make a silk purse of a sow's ear and variants Translations (to make a mess of): Mist verzapfen [colloquial] (German), Scheiße bauen [vulgar] (German), vermasseln (German)
    Sense id: en-make_a_pig's_ear_of-en-verb-Bmcutnnm Categories (other): British English, English entries with incorrect language header

Download JSON data for make a pig's ear of meaning in English (2.5kB)

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          "ref": "14 August 2013, Daniel Taylor, “Rickie Lambert's debut goal gives England victory over Scotland”, in The Guardian",
          "text": "England responded with goals of their own from Theo Walcott and Danny Welbeck and, on the balance of play, deserved the victory. Yet there were long spells when they threatened to make a pig's ear of it.",
          "type": "quotation"
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        {
          "ref": "2003, Kate Walker, Desert Affair, page 140",
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          "code": "de",
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          "sense": "to make a mess of",
          "tags": [
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          "word": "Mist verzapfen"
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          "sense": "to make a mess of",
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      "word": "Mist verzapfen"
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      "sense": "to make a mess of",
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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 2024-05-01 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-04-21 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.