lickety-split .
very quickly
TRANSLATION
lickety-split = Blitzschnell, hoppla hopp, mit Volldampf, ruckzuck, wie der Blitz, stante pede, augenblicklich, ohne Verzögerung, sofort
STATISTICS
IN THE PRESS
“The writer, trained on the keyboard, had a way with words and could put together the story LICKETY-SPLIT.” In short, there was the person who got the story and the person who wrote it.”
Sarah Fergus — Twipe (2nd January 2025)
Did you
know?
lickety-split
adverb (informal)
- very quickly
The Cambridge Dictionary
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WORD ORIGIN
The earliest citations appear in the mid-1800s in U.S. newspapers and humour magazines, but the phrase was almost certainly in oral use earlier. In a New York sporting paper The Spirit of the Times “…going lickety-split down the hill” (1848).
Lickety-split is a classic example of a reduplicative intensive (a playful doubling of sounds for emphasis, like tick-tock (clocks), clippity-clop (horses' hooves), clickety-click (train wheels), and pitter-patter (falling rain).
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SMALL BEATS BIG
The acceleration of a chameleon’s tongue is the equivalent of getting from 0 to 60mph in 100th of a second, that’s 264 times the normal force of gravity at peak acceleration. In the course of sticking out its tongue to 2.5 times its own body length, this animal generates the highest yet measured acceleration and power output per kilogram of muscle mass of any reptile, bird, or mammal: 14,040 watts per kilogram.
Report by Christopher V. Anderson: “Off like a shot: scaling of ballistic tongue projection reveals extremely high performance in small chameleons”
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SYNONYMS
asap, as fast as your legs can carry you (a speeding bullet, swift as an arrow), at a gallop, at breakneck speed (full throttle, full tilt, light speed, once, the double), before you can say Jack Robinson, before you can say knife chop-chop, double-quick, expeditiously, fast and furious, flat-out, full tilt, hell-for-leather, here and now, hotfoot, immediately, in a flash (a jiffy, a nanosecond, a trice, a twinkling, double quick time, less than no time, next to no time, short order, the bat/wink of an eye) like a bat out of hell (a bullet out of a gun, a shot, blazes, greased lightning, like the clappers, the deuce), LICKETY-SPLIT, on the double, posthaste, presto, pronto, quick as a flash (as a fox), right off the bat, snappily, toot sweet, with all possible haste (all speed), without delay (discussion, due process, formality, further ado, more ado), zippily
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PRACTICE OWAD in a conversation, say something like:
“We need the report LICKETY-SPLIT for our presentation this afternoon, OK?”
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