"rocket surgery" meaning in English

See rocket surgery in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Etymology: A deliberate mixed metaphor combining rocket science and brain surgery. Head templates: {{en-noun|-}} rocket surgery (uncountable)
  1. (chiefly in the negative) Anything overly complex, detailed or confusing. Tags: uncountable Related terms: rocket surgeon Translations (anything overly complex): rakettitiede (Finnish)
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          "text": "It's not rocket surgery. Just screw in the bulb and flip the switch.",
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      "glosses": [
        "Anything overly complex, detailed or confusing."
      ],
      "id": "en-rocket_surgery-en-noun-Kew4cPn7",
      "links": [
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        "(chiefly in the negative) Anything overly complex, detailed or confusing."
      ],
      "raw_tags": [
        "in the negative"
      ],
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        {
          "word": "rocket surgeon"
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      ],
      "tags": [
        "uncountable"
      ],
      "translations": [
        {
          "code": "fi",
          "lang": "Finnish",
          "sense": "anything overly complex",
          "word": "rakettitiede"
        }
      ]
    }
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  "word": "rocket surgery"
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        "(chiefly in the negative) Anything overly complex, detailed or confusing."
      ],
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        "in the negative"
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  ],
  "translations": [
    {
      "code": "fi",
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      "sense": "anything overly complex",
      "word": "rakettitiede"
    }
  ],
  "word": "rocket surgery"
}

Download raw JSONL data for rocket surgery meaning in English (1.2kB)


This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2025-04-05 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2025-04-03 using wiktextract (8c1bb29 and fb63907). 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.