Word.ws English Dictionary

like a dose of salts

like a dose of salts prepositional phrase: very quickly and thoroughly.

Prepositional phrase

  1. (simile) Very quickly and thoroughly.
    • After five minutes' conversation with me the old folks would penetrate the deception like a dose of salts.1949, P.G. Wodehouse, The Mating Season
    • Every so often a mass campaign swept the country like a dose of salts, and officials, writers, artists, people in the public eye were purged and flushed out on a tidal wave of hysteria.2009, Esther Cheo Ying, Black Country to Red China, →ISBN

Origin of like a dose of salts

From the laxative properties of Epsom salts.

Questions about like a dose of salts

What does like a dose of salts mean?
Like a dose of salts means very quickly and thoroughly.
What part of speech is like a dose of salts?
Like a dose of salts is a prepositional phrase.

Words near like a dose of salts in the dictionary

  1. like a dog in heat
  2. like a dog on heat
  3. like a dog with a bone
  4. like a dog with two dicks
  5. like a dog with two tails
  6. like a dose of salts
  7. like a dream
  8. like a drowned rat
  9. like a duck takes to water
  10. like a duck to water
  11. like a dying duck in a thunderstorm

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: like a dose of salts (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: “like a dose of salts.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/like_a_dose_of_salts. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.