"water off a duck's back" meaning in English

See water off a duck's back in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Etymology: From the idea that water rolls easily off a duck's back and does not penetrate the duck's feathers. Head templates: {{en-noun|-}} water off a duck's back (uncountable)
  1. Something potentially harmful or hurtful, such as criticism or insult, that nevertheless has no effect or impact on the target. Tags: uncountable
    Sense id: en-water_off_a_duck's_back-en-noun-SLbw3MCR Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header

Alternative forms

Download JSON data for water off a duck's back meaning in English (0.8kB)

{
  "etymology_text": "From the idea that water rolls easily off a duck's back and does not penetrate the duck's feathers.",
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "-"
      },
      "expansion": "water off a duck's back (uncountable)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
          "parents": [
            "Entries with incorrect language header",
            "Entry maintenance"
          ],
          "source": "w"
        }
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "text": "She's always going on at him about something, but to him it's all water off a duck's back."
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "Something potentially harmful or hurtful, such as criticism or insult, that nevertheless has no effect or impact on the target."
      ],
      "id": "en-water_off_a_duck's_back-en-noun-SLbw3MCR",
      "tags": [
        "uncountable"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "water off a duck's back"
}

{
  "etymology_text": "From the idea that water rolls easily off a duck's back and does not penetrate the duck's feathers.",
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "-"
      },
      "expansion": "water off a duck's back (uncountable)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        "English entries with incorrect language header",
        "English lemmas",
        "English multiword terms",
        "English nouns",
        "English uncountable nouns"
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "text": "She's always going on at him about something, but to him it's all water off a duck's back."
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "Something potentially harmful or hurtful, such as criticism or insult, that nevertheless has no effect or impact on the target."
      ],
      "tags": [
        "uncountable"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "water off a duck's back"
}

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.