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in a flash
Idioms and Phrases
Also, in a jiffy or second or trice . Quickly, immediately. For example, I'll be with you in a flash , or He said he'd be done in a jiffy , or I'll be off the phone in a second , or I felt a drop or two, and in a trice there was a downpour . The first idiom alludes to a flash of lightning and dates from about 1800. The word jiffy , meaning “a short time,” is of uncertain origin and dates from the late 1700s (as does the idiom using it); a second , literally one-sixtieth of a minute, has been used vaguely to mean “a very short time” since the early 1800s; and trice originally meant “a single pull at something” and has been used figuratively since the 1500s.Example Sentences
What makes “Così” modern is that it underscores just how quickly and radically things can change in a flash.
The movie recounts how, as a cub, Mufasa was traveling with his parents when he was suddenly swept away by river rapids in a flash flood.
And then it was all sort of taken away in a flash — for good reason, for an understandable cause.
First 30 laps went by in a flash.
When the system finally started marching south, it resulted in a flash flood warning in San Francisco, which Flynn called “pretty rare.”
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Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
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