See the bee's knees in All languages combined, or Wiktionary
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"etymology_text": "Attested since 1922, of unclear origin. There are several suggested origins, but it most likely arose in imitation of the numerous animal-related nonsense phrases popular in the 1920s such as the cat's pyjamas, cat's whiskers, cat's meow, gnat's elbow, monkey's eyebrows etc.\nA popular folk etymology has the phrase referring to the world champion dancer Bee Jackson. Another suggestion is that the phrase is a corruption of business but this may be a back-formation. The singular bee's knee is attested from the late 18th century meaning something small or insignificant in the phrase big as a bee's knee. Also as weak as a bee's knee is attested in Ireland (1870). It is possible that the bee's knees is a deliberate inversion of this meaning but is not attested. Another possibility is that this is a reference to the (visible) blobs of pollen in bees' corbiculae.",
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"word": "das Gelbe vom Ei"
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"word": "legklasszabb"
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"word": "il meglio del meglio"
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"code": "cmn",
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"sense": "something excellent, outstanding",
"word": "好極了"
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"code": "cmn",
"lang": "Chinese Mandarin",
"roman": "hǎo jíle",
"sense": "something excellent, outstanding",
"word": "好极了"
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{
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"sense": "something excellent, outstanding",
"word": "很棒"
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"sense": "something excellent, outstanding",
"word": "jé van hét"
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{
"code": "nl",
"lang": "Dutch",
"sense": "something excellent, outstanding",
"word": "het neusje van de zalm"
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{
"code": "fi",
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"sense": "something excellent, outstanding",
"word": "maailman paras juttu"
},
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"word": "le nec plus ultra"
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"sense": "something excellent, outstanding",
"word": "das Gelbe vom Ei"
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"word": "csúcs"
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"word": "legmenőbb"
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"word": "il meglio del meglio"
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"word": "la mamá de Tarzán"
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"word": "the bee's knees"
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Download raw JSONL data for the bee's knees meaning in English (6.0kB)
This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-11-06 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-10-02 using wiktextract (fbeafe8 and 7f03c9b). 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.