"upset the applecart" meaning in English

See upset the applecart in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Verb

Audio: En-au-upset the applecart.ogg [Australia] Forms: upsets the applecart [present, singular, third-person], upsetting the applecart [participle, present], upset the applecart [participle, past], upset the applecart [past]
Head templates: {{en-verb|upset<,++,upset> the applecart}} upset the applecart (third-person singular simple present upsets the applecart, present participle upsetting the applecart, simple past and past participle upset the applecart)
  1. (idiomatic) To disorganize or spoil something, especially an established arrangement or plan. Tags: idiomatic Synonyms: cook someone's goose, drive a coach and horses through, spoil, put a damper on, upset the apple cart

Inflected forms

Alternative forms

Download JSON data for upset the applecart meaning in English (3.3kB)

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    {
      "form": "upsets the applecart",
      "tags": [
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    {
      "form": "upsetting the applecart",
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    {
      "form": "upset the applecart",
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      "name": "en-verb"
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        {
          "ref": "1900, E. Phillips Oppenheim, chapter 22, in A Millionaire of Yesterday",
          "text": "“There are three reasons,” Trent answered. “First, he may find his way to England and upset the applecart; […]”",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1922, William Somerset Maugham, Caesar's Wife, act 3, page 136",
          "text": "She told me herself just now that the worst was over. And those confounded people must go and upset the applecart.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1979 December 10, “Business: Putting Brakes on a Bailout”, in Time, archived from the original on 2012-02-10",
          "text": "Last week the Senate Banking Committee upset the carefully stacked apple cart when it voted 10 to 5 not to approve the Administration's bill.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2011, Mira Bartók, The Memory Palace, page 5",
          "text": "This kind of impact causes contusions in the front and back areas of the brain and can create microscopic bleeding and shearing of neural pathways, causing synapses to misfire, upsetting the applecart of your brain, sometimes forever.",
          "type": "quotation"
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        "To disorganize or spoil something, especially an established arrangement or plan."
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        "(idiomatic) To disorganize or spoil something, especially an established arrangement or plan."
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        {
          "word": "drive a coach and horses through"
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          "word": "spoil"
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          "word": "put a damper on"
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          "word": "upset the apple cart"
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  "word": "upset the applecart"
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    {
      "form": "upset the applecart",
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      "form": "upset the applecart",
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        {
          "ref": "1922, William Somerset Maugham, Caesar's Wife, act 3, page 136",
          "text": "She told me herself just now that the worst was over. And those confounded people must go and upset the applecart.",
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        {
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          "word": "cook someone's goose"
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          "word": "drive a coach and horses through"
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          "word": "spoil"
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        {
          "word": "put a damper on"
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    {
      "word": "upset the apple cart"
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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 2024-05-03 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.

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