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in so many words
Idioms and Phrases
In those precise words; also, plainly, directly. For example, He didn't tell me in so many words, but I understood that he planned to apply , or, as Charles Dickens put it in Sketches by âBozâ (1836): âThat the Lord Mayor had threatened in so many words to pull down the London Bridge.â [Late 1600s]Example Sentences
Well, said the judge in so many words, now let politicians suck up their own medicine.
It said, in so many words, they had been wrongly accused of being âkingpinsâ and did not deserve their 20-year sentences.
One's immediate reaction is entirely reasonable: he blurts out in so many words that he doesnât know what âpansexualâ means.
News flash: Republicans havenât said it in so many words, but they seem to have a new line of attack against President Biden: He suffers from dissociative identity disorder.
Nordstrom recalled to The New York Times in 2019 that, as the company expanded to California decades earlier, âI was told in so many words by the experts, you know, âyou guys are basically a bunch of dumb Swedes selling to another bunch of dumb Swedes, up in Seattle, in the woods up there.
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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 HeritageŸ Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
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