gut punch
gut punch noun: a hard hit to the stomach.
Noun
gut punch (plural gut punches)
- A hard hit to the stomach.
- A sudden, profound, emotional shock or disappointment that evokes visceral distress.
- Now their powder would be cannon powder and gun powder, would be made into canister shot, and would propel balls into flesh, and would blow living men to shreds. The whole idea was a gut punch.1991, D. L. Carey, Distant Drums - Volume 1, page 523
- Mizuho denied it, but the report was a gut punch for the stock market, where the Nikkei average sank 189 points or 1.5% Wednesday, and retreated another 22 points today to close at 12,607.2001, The Weekly Japan Digest, Volume 12, Issues 16-28, p. 7
Examples of gut punch in a sentence
- So when he died—on June 19, 1986, from a cocaine overdose, two days after being selected No. 2 overall in the NBA Draft—it was a gut punch for the whole region.2019, Marcus Thompson, KD: Kevin Durant's Relentless Pursuit to Be the Greatest, page 2:
- The president’s visit to Ukraine was a gut punch to the Russian leader.2023 February 20, Eliot A. Cohen, “Biden Just Destroyed Putin’s Last Hope”, in The Atlantic:
Forms of gut punch
| plural | gut punches |
|---|
Questions about gut punch
- What does gut punch mean?
- Gut punch means a hard hit to the stomach.
- How do you use gut punch in a sentence?
- So when he died—on June 19, 1986, from a cocaine overdose, two days after being selected No. 2 overall in the NBA Draft—it was a gut punch for the whole region.
- What part of speech is gut punch?
- Gut punch is a noun.
- What is the plural of gut punch?
- The plural of gut punch is gut punches.
Words near gut punch in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: gut punch (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:
Cite this entry: “gut punch.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/gut_punch. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.