"smoking gun" meaning in English

{
  "etymology_text": "Often traced back to the Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Gloria Scott.",
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "smoking guns",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {},
      "expansion": "smoking gun (plural smoking guns)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
          "parents": [
            "Entries with incorrect language header",
            "Entry maintenance"
          ],
          "source": "w"
        },
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "Terms with Bulgarian translations",
          "parents": [],
          "source": "w"
        },
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "Terms with Finnish translations",
          "parents": [],
          "source": "w"
        },
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "Terms with Italian translations",
          "parents": [],
          "source": "w"
        },
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "Terms with Portuguese translations",
          "parents": [],
          "source": "w"
        }
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "text": "We have a theory, but we haven't found a smoking gun yet.",
          "type": "example"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1992, Bruce Sterling, The Hacker Crackdown",
          "text": "When Prophet's place in Decatur, Georgia was raided in July 1989, there was the E911 Document, a smoking gun. And there was Prophet in the hands of the Secret Service, doing his best to \"explain.\"",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2003 January 9, Hans Blix, “Notes for Briefing the Security Council”, in UNMOVIC",
          "text": "I now turn to the role and results of our current inspections. Evidently if we had found any ‘smoking gun’ we would have reported it to the Council.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2005 June 12, Michael Kinsley, “No Smoking Gun”, in Washington Post",
          "text": "It's all over the blogosphere and Air America, the left-wing talk radio network: This is the smoking gun of the Iraq war. It is proof positive that President Bush was determined to invade Iraq the year before he did so",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2021 June 9, Peter Beaumont, “Leading biologist dampens his ‘smoking gun’ Covid lab leak theory”, in The Guardian, →ISSN",
          "text": "A Nobel prize-winning US biologist, who has been widely quoted describing a “smoking gun” to support the thesis that Covid-19 was genetically modified and escaped from a Wuhan lab, has said he overstated the case.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2023 September 28, HarryBlank, “Hooking Up”, in SCP Foundation, archived from the original on 2024-05-25",
          "text": "\"He can weasel out if it.\" Ibanez massaged her knuckles. \"He can say Couch welshed on a deal, and didn't show, and that's why Karen got got. It isn't conclusive. I have another thing I can lay on him, but even the two combined won't do. We need a third smoking gun if we're really gonna smoke this son of a bitch.\"",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "Evidence, particularly of a crime, that is difficult or impossible to dispute."
      ],
      "id": "en-smoking_gun-en-noun-UuALrR9Q",
      "links": [
        [
          "Evidence",
          "evidence"
        ],
        [
          "crime",
          "crime"
        ],
        [
          "difficult",
          "difficult"
        ],
        [
          "impossible",
          "impossible"
        ],
        [
          "dispute",
          "dispute"
        ]
      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(idiomatic) Evidence, particularly of a crime, that is difficult or impossible to dispute."
      ],
      "tags": [
        "idiomatic"
      ],
      "translations": [
        {
          "code": "bg",
          "lang": "Bulgarian",
          "roman": "neoproveržimo dokazatelstvo",
          "sense": "evidence",
          "word": "неопровержимо доказателство"
        },
        {
          "code": "fi",
          "lang": "Finnish",
          "sense": "evidence",
          "word": "pitävä näyttö"
        },
        {
          "code": "fi",
          "lang": "Finnish",
          "sense": "evidence",
          "word": "savuava ase"
        },
        {
          "code": "it",
          "lang": "Italian",
          "sense": "evidence",
          "tags": [
            "feminine"
          ],
          "word": "pistola fumante"
        },
        {
          "code": "pt",
          "lang": "Portuguese",
          "sense": "evidence",
          "word": "batom na cueca"
        }
      ],
      "wikipedia": [
        "The Adventure of the Gloria Scott",
        "The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes",
        "smoking gun"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "sounds": [
    {
      "audio": "En-au-smoking gun.ogg",
      "mp3_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/6/6d/En-au-smoking_gun.ogg/En-au-smoking_gun.ogg.mp3",
      "ogg_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6d/En-au-smoking_gun.ogg"
    }
  ],
  "word": "smoking gun"
}

{
  "etymology_text": "Often traced back to the Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Gloria Scott.",
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "smoking guns",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {},
      "expansion": "smoking gun (plural smoking guns)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        "English countable nouns",
        "English entries with incorrect language header",
        "English idioms",
        "English lemmas",
        "English multiword terms",
        "English nouns",
        "English terms with audio links",
        "English terms with quotations",
        "English terms with usage examples",
        "Terms with Bulgarian translations",
        "Terms with Finnish translations",
        "Terms with Italian translations",
        "Terms with Portuguese translations",
        "Undetermined terms with quotations"
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "text": "We have a theory, but we haven't found a smoking gun yet.",
          "type": "example"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1992, Bruce Sterling, The Hacker Crackdown",
          "text": "When Prophet's place in Decatur, Georgia was raided in July 1989, there was the E911 Document, a smoking gun. And there was Prophet in the hands of the Secret Service, doing his best to \"explain.\"",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2003 January 9, Hans Blix, “Notes for Briefing the Security Council”, in UNMOVIC",
          "text": "I now turn to the role and results of our current inspections. Evidently if we had found any ‘smoking gun’ we would have reported it to the Council.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2005 June 12, Michael Kinsley, “No Smoking Gun”, in Washington Post",
          "text": "It's all over the blogosphere and Air America, the left-wing talk radio network: This is the smoking gun of the Iraq war. It is proof positive that President Bush was determined to invade Iraq the year before he did so",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2021 June 9, Peter Beaumont, “Leading biologist dampens his ‘smoking gun’ Covid lab leak theory”, in The Guardian, →ISSN",
          "text": "A Nobel prize-winning US biologist, who has been widely quoted describing a “smoking gun” to support the thesis that Covid-19 was genetically modified and escaped from a Wuhan lab, has said he overstated the case.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2023 September 28, HarryBlank, “Hooking Up”, in SCP Foundation, archived from the original on 2024-05-25",
          "text": "\"He can weasel out if it.\" Ibanez massaged her knuckles. \"He can say Couch welshed on a deal, and didn't show, and that's why Karen got got. It isn't conclusive. I have another thing I can lay on him, but even the two combined won't do. We need a third smoking gun if we're really gonna smoke this son of a bitch.\"",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "Evidence, particularly of a crime, that is difficult or impossible to dispute."
      ],
      "links": [
        [
          "Evidence",
          "evidence"
        ],
        [
          "crime",
          "crime"
        ],
        [
          "difficult",
          "difficult"
        ],
        [
          "impossible",
          "impossible"
        ],
        [
          "dispute",
          "dispute"
        ]
      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(idiomatic) Evidence, particularly of a crime, that is difficult or impossible to dispute."
      ],
      "tags": [
        "idiomatic"
      ],
      "wikipedia": [
        "The Adventure of the Gloria Scott",
        "The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes",
        "smoking gun"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "sounds": [
    {
      "audio": "En-au-smoking gun.ogg",
      "mp3_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/6/6d/En-au-smoking_gun.ogg/En-au-smoking_gun.ogg.mp3",
      "ogg_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6d/En-au-smoking_gun.ogg"
    }
  ],
  "translations": [
    {
      "code": "bg",
      "lang": "Bulgarian",
      "roman": "neoproveržimo dokazatelstvo",
      "sense": "evidence",
      "word": "неопровержимо доказателство"
    },
    {
      "code": "fi",
      "lang": "Finnish",
      "sense": "evidence",
      "word": "pitävä näyttö"
    },
    {
      "code": "fi",
      "lang": "Finnish",
      "sense": "evidence",
      "word": "savuava ase"
    },
    {
      "code": "it",
      "lang": "Italian",
      "sense": "evidence",
      "tags": [
        "feminine"
      ],
      "word": "pistola fumante"
    },
    {
      "code": "pt",
      "lang": "Portuguese",
      "sense": "evidence",
      "word": "batom na cueca"
    }
  ],
  "word": "smoking gun"
}