Word.ws English Dictionary

lick and a promise

lick and a promise noun: a quick, not-very-thorough wash.

Noun

a lick and a promise

  1. (idiomatic) A quick, not-very-thorough wash.
    • My grandparents called me only an hour before they decided to come visit, so I had to give the dirty living room a lick and a promise.
    • She'd given her face a lick and a promise, drawn her hair back tight and walked in.2007, Joy Dettman, One Sunday
  2. (broadly, idiomatic) The hasty or incomplete performance of a task, done with the intention ("a promise") of thorough completion later.
    • Now this is not the way to get a house in order. What this place needs is a real thorough old-fashioned cleaning. A lick and a promise won't do, no, sir!1955, Max Shulman, Robert Paul Smith, The Tender Trap: A Comedy, page 14
    • The snowplows had made what Myles would call a lick-and-a-promise attempt to partially clear the accumulated snow from West End Avenue.2000, Mary Higgins Clark, While My Pretty One Sleeps

Examples of lick and a promise in a sentence

  • He never felt quite clean with “cat baths”—as Marcel called them, or “a lick and a promise,” the way Renaud put it.2010, Nina Ansley, The Plague of Provence, page 47:
  • She had been forced to bathe in the washbasins of the inns along the route, giving herself what her old nursemaid would have called “a lick and a promise.”2014, Margaret Weis, Robert Krammes, The Seventh Sigil:
  • Well, he knows hes supposed to make his bed before he goes to school, so he gives it a lick and a promise and walks out of the room.2013, David Jeremiah, God in You: Releasing the Power of the Holy Spirit in Your Life:
  • Rising out of poverty will require not a lick and a promise but deep reform.2014 May 22, “EDITORIAL: India's Modi wins voter mandate for economic growth”, in Washington Times:

Questions about lick and a promise

What does lick and a promise mean?
Lick and a promise means a quick, not-very-thorough wash.
How do you use lick and a promise in a sentence?
He never felt quite clean with “cat baths”—as Marcel called them, or “a lick and a promise,” the way Renaud put it.
What part of speech is lick and a promise?
Lick and a promise is a noun.

Words near lick and a promise in the dictionary

  1. licitations
  2. licitly
  3. licitness
  4. Licius
  5. lick
  6. lick and a promise
  7. lick and stick
  8. lick clean
  9. lick into shape
  10. lick job
  11. lick jobs

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: lick and a promise (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-lick and a promise.ogg.

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