cock-and-bull story
cock-and-bull story noun: a far-fetched and fanciful story or tale of highly dubious validity.
Noun
cock-and-bull story (plural cock-and-bull stories)
- A far-fetched and fanciful story or tale of highly dubious validity.
- The grinning landlord, as well as the boarders, seemed amazingly tickled at the sudden friendship which had sprung up between me and Queequeg—especially as Peter Coffin’s cock and bull stories about him had previously so much alarmed me concerning the very person whom I now companied with.1851 November 14, Herman Melville, chapter XIII, in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, →OCLC
- Finding us easy in our ways, he […] told me a cock-and-bull story with the moral of another five francs for the narrator. The thing was palpably absurd; but I paid up, and at once dropped all friendliness of manner, and kept him in his place as an inferior with freezing British dignity. He saw in a...1878, Robert Louis Stevenson, “Down the Oise: To Moy”, in An Inland Voyage, London: C[harles] Kegan Paul & Co., […], →OCLC, page 141
- Synonyms:
- Banbury story of a cock and a bull
cock-and-bull story meaning in Kannada and Punjabi
cock-and-bull story in Kannada
- ಕಾಗಕ್ಕ ಗುಬ್ಬಕ್ಕನ ಕಥೆ, ಕಟ್ಟು ಕಥೆ
cock-and-bull story in Punjabi
- far-fetched and fanciful story or tale of highly dubious validity
- ਗਪੌੜ gapauṛ
Examples of cock-and-bull story in a sentence
- Finding us easy in our ways, he […] told me a cock-and-bull story with the moral of another five francs for the narrator.1878, Robert Louis Stevenson, “Down the Oise: To Moy”, in An Inland Voyage, London: C[harles] Kegan Paul & Co., […], →OCLC, page 141:
- "Challenger was the man who came with some cock-and-bull story from South America." "What story?" "Oh, it was rank nonsense about some queer animals he had discovered."1912, Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World […], London; New York, N.Y.: Hodder and Stoughton, →OCLC:
Synonyms of cock-and-bull story
Forms of cock-and-bull story
| plural | cock-and-bull stories |
|---|
Origin of cock-and-bull story
Unknown. The phrase is noted as similar in meaning and form to French coq-à-l'âne (“satire, incoherent story”, literally “cock to the ass”) which was borrowed into Scots as cockalane. theories of origin Theories of the term's ultimate origin include allusions to stories which feature talking animals and that the term refers to gossip typical of what were historically two coaching inns, The Cock and The Bull, in Stony Stratford, England.
Questions about cock-and-bull story
- What does cock-and-bull story mean?
- Cock-and-bull story means a far-fetched and fanciful story or tale of highly dubious validity.
- What is cock-and-bull story in Kannada?
- Cock-and-bull story in Kannada is ಕಾಗಕ್ಕ ಗುಬ್ಬಕ್ಕನ ಕಥೆ, ಕಟ್ಟು ಕಥೆ. See Cock-and-bull story meaning in Kannada.
- How do you use cock-and-bull story in a sentence?
- Finding us easy in our ways, he […] told me a cock-and-bull story with the moral of another five francs for the narrator.
- What part of speech is cock-and-bull story?
- Cock-and-bull story is a noun.
- What is the plural of cock-and-bull story?
- The plural of cock-and-bull story is cock-and-bull stories.
Words near cock-and-bull story in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: cock-and-bull story (page history and authors); cock-and-bull story (Kannada Wiktionary) (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.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-cock-and-bull story.ogg.
Cite this entry: “cock-and-bull story.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cock-and-bull_story. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.