"throw a wrench in the works" meaning in English

See throw a wrench in the works in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Verb

Forms: throws a wrench in the works [present, singular, third-person], throwing a wrench in the works [participle, present], threw a wrench in the works [past], thrown a wrench in the works [participle, past]
Head templates: {{en-verb|throw<,,threw,thrown> a wrench in the works}} throw a wrench in the works (third-person singular simple present throws a wrench in the works, present participle throwing a wrench in the works, simple past threw a wrench in the works, past participle thrown a wrench in the works)
  1. (idiomatic, US) Synonym of throw a spanner in the works. Tags: US, idiomatic Synonyms: throw a spanner in the works [synonym, synonym-of], throw a wrench into the works Related terms: throw a wrench in
    Sense id: en-throw_a_wrench_in_the_works-en-verb-ga9nV1C2 Categories (other): American English, English entries with incorrect language header

Inflected forms

Alternative forms

Download JSON data for throw a wrench in the works meaning in English (1.5kB)

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  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "throws a wrench in the works",
      "tags": [
        "present",
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    {
      "form": "throwing a wrench in the works",
      "tags": [
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    },
    {
      "form": "threw a wrench in the works",
      "tags": [
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        "Synonym of throw a spanner in the works."
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        "(idiomatic, US) Synonym of throw a spanner in the works."
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      "form": "throws a wrench in the works",
      "tags": [
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    {
      "form": "threw a wrench in the works",
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      "form": "thrown a wrench in the works",
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  "word": "throw a wrench in the works"
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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 2024-04-26 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-04-21 using wiktextract (93a6c53 and 21a9316). 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.