"the shirt off one's back" meaning in English

See the shirt off one's back in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Head templates: {{en-noun|!}} the shirt off one's back (plural not attested)
  1. (idiomatic) Everything currently in the possession of a person. Tags: idiomatic, no-plural
    Sense id: en-the_shirt_off_one's_back-en-noun-pDYrVnyj Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header, English nouns with unattested plurals

Download JSON data for the shirt off one's back meaning in English (1.8kB)

{
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "!"
      },
      "expansion": "the shirt off one's back (plural not attested)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
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      "categories": [
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
          "parents": [
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        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English nouns with unattested plurals",
          "parents": [
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            "Nouns",
            "Lemmas"
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          "source": "w"
        }
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      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "1991, Richard Preston, American Steel: Hot Metal Men and the Resurrection of the Rust Belt, New York: Prentice Hall Press, page 89",
          "text": "\"I don't plan on selling my Nuclear shares,\" replied Lillis. \"But I've been on Wall Street for fifty years, and if there's one thing I learned, it's that at the right price I'd sell the shirt off my back.\"",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2009, Dan Houser, Rupert Humphries, Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned, Rockstar Games, Xbox 360, level/area: Roman's Holiday",
          "text": "Please, gentlemen. The men in there just took my money. I can't get robbed twice in one day! What do you want, the shirt off my back? Come on.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2014, Linda Goodnight, Cowboy Under the Mistletoe, New York: Harlequin, page 78",
          "text": "Though a good guy who'd give the shirt off his back to a friend, Brady Buchanon was a formidable enemy. They all were. Buchanons protected their own.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "Everything currently in the possession of a person."
      ],
      "id": "en-the_shirt_off_one's_back-en-noun-pDYrVnyj",
      "links": [
        [
          "Everything",
          "everything"
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        [
          "possession",
          "possession"
        ]
      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(idiomatic) Everything currently in the possession of a person."
      ],
      "tags": [
        "idiomatic",
        "no-plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "the shirt off one's back"
}
{
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "!"
      },
      "expansion": "the shirt off one's back (plural not attested)",
      "name": "en-noun"
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  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
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      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "1991, Richard Preston, American Steel: Hot Metal Men and the Resurrection of the Rust Belt, New York: Prentice Hall Press, page 89",
          "text": "\"I don't plan on selling my Nuclear shares,\" replied Lillis. \"But I've been on Wall Street for fifty years, and if there's one thing I learned, it's that at the right price I'd sell the shirt off my back.\"",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2009, Dan Houser, Rupert Humphries, Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned, Rockstar Games, Xbox 360, level/area: Roman's Holiday",
          "text": "Please, gentlemen. The men in there just took my money. I can't get robbed twice in one day! What do you want, the shirt off my back? Come on.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2014, Linda Goodnight, Cowboy Under the Mistletoe, New York: Harlequin, page 78",
          "text": "Though a good guy who'd give the shirt off his back to a friend, Brady Buchanon was a formidable enemy. They all were. Buchanons protected their own.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "Everything currently in the possession of a person."
      ],
      "links": [
        [
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      "raw_glosses": [
        "(idiomatic) Everything currently in the possession of a person."
      ],
      "tags": [
        "idiomatic",
        "no-plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "the shirt off one's back"
}

This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-06-23 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-06-20 using wiktextract (1b9bfc5 and 0136956). 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.