"the bomb" meaning in English

See the bomb in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Audio: En-au-the bomb.ogg [Australia] Forms: the bombs [plural]
Etymology: Attested in reference to nuclear weapons or the capacity to use them since 1932; see quotations, below. As slang for something excellent, the phrase is attested since the 1960s; compare go down a bomb, UK theatre slang during the 1950s meaning “be a major success”. For further etymology see bomb. Etymology templates: {{m|en|bomb}} bomb Head templates: {{en-noun|-|s}} the bomb (usually uncountable, plural the bombs)
  1. (informal, often capitalized) The atomic bomb; the capability to launch a nuclear attack. Tags: capitalized, informal, often, uncountable, usually Categories (topical): Explosives, Nuclear warfare
    Sense id: en-the_bomb-en-noun-dBkC7UB5 Disambiguation of Explosives: 99 1 Disambiguation of Nuclear warfare: 99 1 Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header, English entries with topic categories using raw markup, English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 91 9 Disambiguation of English entries with topic categories using raw markup: 97 3 Disambiguation of English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys: 96 4
  2. (slang) A success; something excellent. Tags: slang, uncountable, usually Synonyms (a success): da bomb
    Sense id: en-the_bomb-en-noun-JbRqjw4C Disambiguation of 'a success': 2 98

Inflected forms

Alternative forms

Download JSON data for the bomb meaning in English (4.2kB)

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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.