Word.ws English Dictionary

like kicking dead whales down the beach

like kicking dead whales down the beach prepositional phrase: very slow and difficult.

Prepositional phrase

  1. (slang, usually, simile, process) Very slow and difficult.
    • I have a full backup, but restoring 213 MB of data from one oppy to another with a single drive, even using dd and big packets, is going to be like kicking dead whales down the beach. Is there an easier way?1993 September 16, Joshua W. Burton, “OD has no more alternates for remap -- should I worry?”, in comp.sys.next.hardware (Usenet)
    • “How’s it going?” I asked. ¶ “Swimmingly, man. Like kicking dead whales down the beach.”1998 April, Mark Fabi, “Wall Street Walpurgisnacht” (chapter 3), in Wyrm, New York, N.Y.: Bantam Books, →ISBN, page 65

Forms of like kicking dead whales down the beach

alternative formlike kicking a dead whale down the beach

Origin of like kicking dead whales down the beach

Originating in computer programming jargon.

Questions about like kicking dead whales down the beach

What does like kicking dead whales down the beach mean?
Like kicking dead whales down the beach means very slow and difficult.
What part of speech is like kicking dead whales down the beach?
Like kicking dead whales down the beach is a prepositional phrase.

Words near like kicking dead whales down the beach in the dictionary

  1. like it or not
  2. like it's going out of fashion
  3. like it's going out of style
  4. like it's nobody's business
  5. like kicking a dead whale down the beach
  6. like kicking dead whales down the beach
  7. like lightning
  8. like like
  9. like liked
  10. like likes
  11. like liking

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: like kicking dead whales down the beach (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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