OLD CHESTNUT Definition & Meaning

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old chestnut

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Idioms and Phrases

A stale joke, story, or saying, as in Dad keeps on telling that old chestnut about how many psychiatrists it takes to change a light bulb . This expression comes from William Dimond's play, The Broken Sword (1816), in which one character keeps repeating the same stories, one of them about a cork tree, and is interrupted each time by another character who says “Chestnut, you mean . . . I have heard you tell the joke twenty-seven times and I am sure it was a chestnut.”

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Example Sentences

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The Old Chestnut of Sint-Rafaël in Belgium is a 150– to 200-year-old witness to the history of Sint-Job-in-'t-Goor.

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Wilson told me about an old chestnut that’s often repeated in the genealogy community: “All people die twice. The first time is when their heart stops beating. The second time is when people forget about them.”

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Not that old chestnut again...

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It wasn’t; it was a hoary old chestnut that had already proved its inadequacy.

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There’s “a lot going on there,” as people say, which perhaps explains why there’s been relatively little attention on this old chestnut of a take by Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist and Republican megadonor who has been a mentor figure to Vance for years.

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Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023

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