See turn a phrase in All languages combined, or Wiktionary
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"ref": "1861, Charles Reade, chapter 61, in The Cloister and the Hearth:",
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"ref": "1887, Francis Marion Crawford, chapter 8, in Paul Patoff:",
"text": "\"Ah, how gracefully these wild northern men can turn a phrase!\" whispered Chrysophrasia.",
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"ref": "1906, Edith Nesbit, chapter 3, in The Incomplete Amorist:",
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"ref": "2004, Elisabeth Egan, \"A world of talking cats and lost, lonely boys\" (review of Moe's Villa and Other Stories by James Purdy), San Francisco Chronicle, 5 Dec. (retrieved 4 June 2008)",
"text": "Nobody, however, can take issue with Purdy's ability to turn a phrase. He has that rare Joycean knack for illuminating an entire universe with one simple detail."
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Download raw JSONL data for turn a phrase meaning in English (2.7kB)
This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2025-01-31 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2025-01-20 using wiktextract (bcd5c38 and 9dbd323). 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.