See pound sand in All languages combined, or Wiktionary
{
"etymology_text": "Of 19th-century origin. Used as an example both of an activity so simple that almost anyone could do it and of an activity so pointless that only a fool would do it.",
"forms": [
{
"form": "pounds sand",
"tags": [
"present",
"singular",
"third-person"
]
},
{
"form": "pounding sand",
"tags": [
"participle",
"present"
]
},
{
"form": "pounded sand",
"tags": [
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"past"
]
},
{
"form": "pounded sand",
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]
}
],
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}
],
"lang": "English",
"lang_code": "en",
"pos": "verb",
"related": [
{
"_dis1": "0 100 0",
"word": "enough sense to pound sand into a rathole"
}
],
"senses": [
{
"categories": [
{
"_dis": "32 36 32",
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"name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
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"ref": "1871 January 20, Everett Chamberlain, “My Christmas at Salt Lake”, in The Lakeside Monthly:",
"text": "\"Bishop McKillup lives there. He's got only three wives, and they three all put together don’t know enough to pound sand with a mallet, with a receipt on the handle.\"\nFor which striking symbol of imbecility I should have given Jake a good deal of credit, if I had not heard him using it several times before as a regular stock expression",
"type": "quote"
}
],
"glosses": [
"To engage in a simple, useless activity that anyone would reasonably know how to perform."
],
"id": "en-pound_sand-en-verb-M5AgUlV~",
"raw_glosses": [
"(informal, idiomatic) To engage in a simple, useless activity that anyone would reasonably know how to perform."
],
"tags": [
"idiomatic",
"informal"
]
},
{
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"ref": "2010, Eric Blehm, The Only Thing Worth Dying For: How Eleven Green Berets Forged a New Afghanistan, HarperCollins, published 2010, →ISBN, page 44:",
"text": "[…] Without men on the ground, we'll be pounding sand.\"",
"type": "quote"
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"ref": "2011, Donald Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown: A Memoir:",
"text": "He told Shelton we needed to \"unleash holy hell.\" “We're not just going to pound sand,” he added.",
"type": "quote"
}
],
"glosses": [
"To engage in a futile activity."
],
"id": "en-pound_sand-en-verb-u~FeAb7H",
"links": [
[
"futile",
"futile"
]
],
"raw_glosses": [
"(informal, idiomatic) To engage in a futile activity."
],
"synonyms": [
{
"word": "get blood out of a stone"
},
{
"word": "piss up a rope"
},
{
"word": "pound dirt"
},
{
"word": "pound salt"
},
{
"word": "pound sand into a rathole"
}
],
"tags": [
"idiomatic",
"informal"
]
},
{
"categories": [
{
"kind": "other",
"name": "English dismissals",
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"examples": [
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"text": "All you do is complain. Why don't you go pound sand up your ass and stop bothering the line staff.",
"type": "example"
},
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134,
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"ref": "2003 March 15, Christopher Koch, “Showdown at the 6.0 Corral”, in CIO:",
"text": "\"The price to us was going to be $3 million, and we had four months to pay before the Licensing 6.0 deadline. We told Microsoft to go pound sand.\"",
"type": "quote"
}
],
"glosses": [
"To go away; get lost; go to hell; to waste one's own time (with some other meaningless task) rather than waste the speaker's time with something equally irritating or pointless."
],
"id": "en-pound_sand-en-verb-hAEoq1Co",
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[
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[
"go away",
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[
"get lost",
"get lost"
],
[
"go to hell",
"go to hell"
],
[
"waste",
"waste"
]
],
"qualifier": "dismissal",
"raw_glosses": [
"(slang, idiomatic, derogatory, dismissal) To go away; get lost; go to hell; to waste one's own time (with some other meaningless task) rather than waste the speaker's time with something equally irritating or pointless."
],
"synonyms": [
{
"word": "get lost"
},
{
"word": "go fly a kite"
},
{
"word": "take a hike"
},
{
"word": "fuck off"
}
],
"tags": [
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"idiomatic",
"slang"
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],
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"word": "pound sand"
}
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"etymology_text": "Of 19th-century origin. Used as an example both of an activity so simple that almost anyone could do it and of an activity so pointless that only a fool would do it.",
"forms": [
{
"form": "pounds sand",
"tags": [
"present",
"singular",
"third-person"
]
},
{
"form": "pounding sand",
"tags": [
"participle",
"present"
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{
"form": "pounded sand",
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{
"form": "pounded sand",
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],
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],
"lang": "English",
"lang_code": "en",
"pos": "verb",
"related": [
{
"word": "enough sense to pound sand into a rathole"
}
],
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"examples": [
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"ref": "1871 January 20, Everett Chamberlain, “My Christmas at Salt Lake”, in The Lakeside Monthly:",
"text": "\"Bishop McKillup lives there. He's got only three wives, and they three all put together don’t know enough to pound sand with a mallet, with a receipt on the handle.\"\nFor which striking symbol of imbecility I should have given Jake a good deal of credit, if I had not heard him using it several times before as a regular stock expression",
"type": "quote"
}
],
"glosses": [
"To engage in a simple, useless activity that anyone would reasonably know how to perform."
],
"raw_glosses": [
"(informal, idiomatic) To engage in a simple, useless activity that anyone would reasonably know how to perform."
],
"tags": [
"idiomatic",
"informal"
]
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"ref": "2010, Eric Blehm, The Only Thing Worth Dying For: How Eleven Green Berets Forged a New Afghanistan, HarperCollins, published 2010, →ISBN, page 44:",
"text": "[…] Without men on the ground, we'll be pounding sand.\"",
"type": "quote"
},
{
"bold_text_offsets": [
[
75,
85
]
],
"ref": "2011, Donald Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown: A Memoir:",
"text": "He told Shelton we needed to \"unleash holy hell.\" “We're not just going to pound sand,” he added.",
"type": "quote"
}
],
"glosses": [
"To engage in a futile activity."
],
"links": [
[
"futile",
"futile"
]
],
"raw_glosses": [
"(informal, idiomatic) To engage in a futile activity."
],
"synonyms": [
{
"word": "get blood out of a stone"
},
{
"word": "piss up a rope"
},
{
"word": "pound dirt"
},
{
"word": "pound salt"
},
{
"word": "pound sand into a rathole"
}
],
"tags": [
"idiomatic",
"informal"
]
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{
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"text": "All you do is complain. Why don't you go pound sand up your ass and stop bothering the line staff.",
"type": "example"
},
{
"bold_text_offsets": [
[
134,
144
]
],
"ref": "2003 March 15, Christopher Koch, “Showdown at the 6.0 Corral”, in CIO:",
"text": "\"The price to us was going to be $3 million, and we had four months to pay before the Licensing 6.0 deadline. We told Microsoft to go pound sand.\"",
"type": "quote"
}
],
"glosses": [
"To go away; get lost; go to hell; to waste one's own time (with some other meaningless task) rather than waste the speaker's time with something equally irritating or pointless."
],
"links": [
[
"derogatory",
"derogatory"
],
[
"dismissal",
"dismissal"
],
[
"go away",
"go away"
],
[
"get lost",
"get lost"
],
[
"go to hell",
"go to hell"
],
[
"waste",
"waste"
]
],
"qualifier": "dismissal",
"raw_glosses": [
"(slang, idiomatic, derogatory, dismissal) To go away; get lost; go to hell; to waste one's own time (with some other meaningless task) rather than waste the speaker's time with something equally irritating or pointless."
],
"synonyms": [
{
"word": "get lost"
},
{
"word": "go fly a kite"
},
{
"word": "take a hike"
},
{
"word": "fuck off"
}
],
"tags": [
"derogatory",
"idiomatic",
"slang"
]
}
],
"sounds": [
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"mp3_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/d/de/En-au-pound_sand.ogg/En-au-pound_sand.ogg.mp3",
"ogg_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/de/En-au-pound_sand.ogg"
}
],
"word": "pound sand"
}
Download raw JSONL data for pound sand meaning in English (4.4kB)
This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2025-12-23 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2025-12-02 using wiktextract (6fdc867 and 9905b1f). 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.