"thick of things" meaning in English

See thick of things in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Audio: En-au-thick of things.ogg [Australia] Forms: the thick of things [canonical]
Head templates: {{head|en|noun|head=the thick of things}} the thick of things
  1. (idiomatic) A central or major role in a situation; a position in which one is surrounded by or very involved in complex, changing events. Tags: idiomatic Related terms: in the swim, in the thick of it
    Sense id: en-thick_of_things-en-noun-XVvcwDML Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header

Download JSON data for thick of things meaning in English (2.0kB)

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      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "1888, Joseph Augustus Seiss, Lectures on the Gospels, vol. 2, Lutheran Bookstore (Philadelphia), p. 767",
          "text": "Christ calls for large ideas, bold enterprise, heavy undertakings, brave adventure, and heroic plunging into the thick of things."
        },
        {
          "ref": "1935 July 3, Charley Gehringer, “Second Base is Toughest Position to Play”, in Pittsburgh Press, page 13",
          "text": "Second base is a pleasurable post for the reason that the man covering it is in the thick of things at all times.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2004 December 15, “VP Race Is On”, in Fiji Times, Australia",
          "text": "During the coup he also kept his distance from the thick of things.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A central or major role in a situation; a position in which one is surrounded by or very involved in complex, changing events."
      ],
      "id": "en-thick_of_things-en-noun-XVvcwDML",
      "links": [
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        [
          "surround",
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        [
          "involve",
          "involve"
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      "raw_glosses": [
        "(idiomatic) A central or major role in a situation; a position in which one is surrounded by or very involved in complex, changing events."
      ],
      "related": [
        {
          "word": "in the swim"
        },
        {
          "word": "in the thick of it"
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  "lang_code": "en",
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      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "1888, Joseph Augustus Seiss, Lectures on the Gospels, vol. 2, Lutheran Bookstore (Philadelphia), p. 767",
          "text": "Christ calls for large ideas, bold enterprise, heavy undertakings, brave adventure, and heroic plunging into the thick of things."
        },
        {
          "ref": "1935 July 3, Charley Gehringer, “Second Base is Toughest Position to Play”, in Pittsburgh Press, page 13",
          "text": "Second base is a pleasurable post for the reason that the man covering it is in the thick of things at all times.",
          "type": "quotation"
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        {
          "ref": "2004 December 15, “VP Race Is On”, in Fiji Times, Australia",
          "text": "During the coup he also kept his distance from the thick of things.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
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      "glosses": [
        "A central or major role in a situation; a position in which one is surrounded by or very involved in complex, changing events."
      ],
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          "central"
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        [
          "major",
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        [
          "surround",
          "surround"
        ],
        [
          "involve",
          "involve"
        ]
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      "raw_glosses": [
        "(idiomatic) A central or major role in a situation; a position in which one is surrounded by or very involved in complex, changing events."
      ],
      "tags": [
        "idiomatic"
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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.