"time burglar" meaning in English

See time burglar in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Audio: En-au-time burglar.ogg [Australia] Forms: time burglars [plural]
Head templates: {{en-noun}} time burglar (plural time burglars)
  1. (informal, idiomatic) Something or someone that consumes an inordinate amount of time, especially without achieving anything productive. Tags: idiomatic, informal Categories (topical): Time Synonyms: time bandit, time thief

Inflected forms

Download JSON data for time burglar meaning in English (2.5kB)

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      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "2012, Nick O'Kelly, Patrick Schulte, Live on the Margin: Learn to Love Risk, Profit from Fear, and Retire Tomorrow, Two Old Goats Publishing",
          "text": "Hey, TV can be a great source of learning, information, and keeping your kids occupied, but if your priorities are shifting and you want to grow out of your current life and into a new one, it's a time burglar […]",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2013, Sandra Thompson, The Ghostly Grammar Boy",
          "text": "Being a social climber was more of a time burglar than having a ghost twin sister.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2015, Jen Lancaster, I Regret Nothing: A Memoir, New American Library",
          "text": "That's when it hits me that Brunswick is a time burglar.\nSpecifically, she's stealing my time with her inane questions and now she is my nemesis.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
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        "Something or someone that consumes an inordinate amount of time, especially without achieving anything productive."
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      "id": "en-time_burglar-en-noun-bFLde44W",
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      "raw_glosses": [
        "(informal, idiomatic) Something or someone that consumes an inordinate amount of time, especially without achieving anything productive."
      ],
      "synonyms": [
        {
          "word": "time bandit"
        },
        {
          "word": "time thief"
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        "informal"
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      "ogg_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/En-au-time_burglar.ogg",
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  "word": "time burglar"
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{
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          "ref": "2012, Nick O'Kelly, Patrick Schulte, Live on the Margin: Learn to Love Risk, Profit from Fear, and Retire Tomorrow, Two Old Goats Publishing",
          "text": "Hey, TV can be a great source of learning, information, and keeping your kids occupied, but if your priorities are shifting and you want to grow out of your current life and into a new one, it's a time burglar […]",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2013, Sandra Thompson, The Ghostly Grammar Boy",
          "text": "Being a social climber was more of a time burglar than having a ghost twin sister.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2015, Jen Lancaster, I Regret Nothing: A Memoir, New American Library",
          "text": "That's when it hits me that Brunswick is a time burglar.\nSpecifically, she's stealing my time with her inane questions and now she is my nemesis.",
          "type": "quotation"
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      ],
      "glosses": [
        "Something or someone that consumes an inordinate amount of time, especially without achieving anything productive."
      ],
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        [
          "time",
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      "raw_glosses": [
        "(informal, idiomatic) Something or someone that consumes an inordinate amount of time, especially without achieving anything productive."
      ],
      "tags": [
        "idiomatic",
        "informal"
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      "ogg_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/En-au-time_burglar.ogg",
      "tags": [
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  "synonyms": [
    {
      "word": "time bandit"
    },
    {
      "word": "time thief"
    }
  ],
  "word": "time burglar"
}

This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-03 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-05-02 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.