pants off, the

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Idioms and Phrases

This phrase is used to intensify the meaning of verbs such as bore or charm or kid or scare or talk . For example, That speech bored the pants off us , or It was a real tornado and scared the pants off me . Playwright Eugene O'Neill used it in Ah, Wilderness! (1933): “I tell you, you scared the pants off him,” and Evelyn Waugh, in A Handful of Dust (1934), had a variation, “She bores my pants off.” [ Colloquial ; early 1900s] Also see bore to death ; beat the pants off .

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Example Sentences

Examples have not been reviewed.

This is a team that just swept the pants off the Dodgers, the Diamondbacks’ 4-2 victory Wednesday night at Chase Field in Phoenix finishing a three-games-to-none clinching of their National League Division Series and completing the most brutal of broom bashings.

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“Gosh, no wonder you beat the pants off the rest of us,” said Dee, laughing.

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We hope people and organizations who still believe in good government sue the pants off the state, and use the courts to their full advantage to overturn these rotten-to-the-core laws.

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“It would scare the pants off the Mayor and leading businessmen.”

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They seem to forget that we were members of the party that was beating the pants off the Democrats for 30 years at all levels of government.

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

“The Owl and the Pussy-Cat”party's over, the

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