Word.ws English Dictionary

cough and a spit

cough and a spit noun: a minor role.

Noun

a cough and a spit

  1. A minor role.
    • Ray Wise managed his back-to-black-hair role before joining Tim Robbins in Bob Roberts and James Marshall squeezed in his cough and a spit between Gladiator and joining the big boys (Nicholson, Cruise) in A Few Good Men […]1992, Film Review, page 6
    • Everybody gargling madly and mugging up their lines as though Shakespeare himself was out front. Don't know why I bothered, I only had a cough and a spit.1998, Ken Whitmore, Alfred Bradley, The Final Twist: A Play, page 20
  2. (UK, colloquial) A very short distance.
    • […] a Lancaster squadron at Bawne, west of Cambridge — it sits a cough and a spit from the Bedfordshire border.2009, David Fiddimore, The Forgotten War, page 5
    • […] Stockwell, a cough and a spit from Vauxhall Cross.2013, Russell Cruse, The Rothko Room, page 258

Questions about cough and a spit

What does cough and a spit mean?
Cough and a spit means a minor role.
What part of speech is cough and a spit?
Cough and a spit is a noun.

Words near cough and a spit in the dictionary

  1. cougarness
  2. cougars
  3. cougarship
  4. Couged it
  5. cough
  6. cough and a spit
  7. cough button
  8. cough buttons
  9. cough candy
  10. cough down
  11. cough drop

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cough and a spit (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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