Word.ws English Dictionary

greased lightning

greased lightning noun: something incredibly fast (now mainly used in comparison: like or faster than greased lightning).

Noun

greased lightning (uncountable)

  1. Something incredibly fast (now mainly used in comparison: like or faster than greased lightning).
    • We find there quite seriously the monstrous hyperboles of swallowing a camel, of having a wooden beam in the eye, of a camel's going through the eye of a needle, of heaping coals of fire on the head; all well enough as jokes, like the description of the Green Mountain road so steep that "greased...1840, American Philosophical Society, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society Held at Philadelphia for Promoting Useful Knowledge. Vol. XVIII. July 1878 to March 1880
    • He rode his own horse, Greased Lightning, and won the Garrison cup at Quebec races.[1847 January – 1848 July, William Makepeace Thackeray, “Sentimental and Otherwise”, in Vanity Fair […], London: Bradbury and Evans […], published 1848, →OCLC, page 104

greased lightning meaning in Malay

greased lightning in Malay

Something incredibly fast
lipas kudung

Origin of greased lightning

Believed to come from the observation that greased machinery tends to run faster, and the notion that if a lightning strike (the fastest normally observed movement) could be greased, it might move even faster. Originally US usage, but soon well known in UK due to Thackeray's use in 1848 (see cite).

Questions about greased lightning

What does greased lightning mean?
Greased lightning means something incredibly fast (now mainly used in comparison: like or faster than greased lightning).
What is greased lightning in Malay?
Greased lightning in Malay is lipas kudung. See Greased lightning meaning in Malay.
What part of speech is greased lightning?
Greased lightning is a noun.

Words near greased lightning in the dictionary

  1. greaseburgers
  2. greased
  3. greased it on
  4. greased landing
  5. greased landings
  6. greased lightning
  7. greased one's gills
  8. greased someone's palm
  9. greased the skids
  10. greased the wheels
  11. greased up

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: greased lightning (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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