Word.ws English Dictionary

before you can say knife

before you can say knife phrase: very quickly; quicker than one expects.

Phrase

before you can say knife

  1. Very quickly; quicker than one expects.
    • 'Oh, we'll pull you off before you can say knife. Take care of His Excellency. I shall try to get a little sleep now.'1893, Rudyard Kipling, “Judson and the Empire”, in Many Inventions
    • ‘Ginger, Ginger, before you can say knife she'll make you into a damned missionary.’ I don't know that I'd mind that so much if we had a little mission of our own.1926, W. Somerset Maugham, “The Letter”, in More Far Eastern Tales, Random House, published 2010, →ISBN

Synonyms of before you can say knife

Questions about before you can say knife

What does before you can say knife mean?
Before you can say knife means very quickly; quicker than one expects.
What part of speech is before you can say knife?
Before you can say knife is a phrase.

Words near before you can say knife in the dictionary

  1. before the ink was dry
  2. before the mast
  3. before times
  4. before you can say Jack Robertson
  5. before you can say Jack Robinson
  6. before you can say knife
  7. before't
  8. before-and-after
  9. before-and-afters
  10. before-hand
  11. before-mentioned

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: before you can say knife (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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