Word.ws English Dictionary

no great scratch

no great scratch phrase: not much good; something of little value or importance.

Phrase

no great scratch

  1. (archaic, slang) Not much good; something of little value or importance.
    • Among the spinners there was one, / Whose name was Samuel Patch; / He moped about, and did his stint / Folks thought him no great scratch.1857, Samuel Griswold Goodrich, Peter Parley's Thousand and One Stories of Fact and Fancy, page 350
    • No great scratch whether there's anythin' to kick at or not, but they know better'n to kick me, though they ain't no love for Henry, and he gives them heels plenty of room, […]1921, Jessie Graham Flower, Grace Harlowe's Overland Riders in the Great North Woods, page 24

Questions about no great scratch

What does no great scratch mean?
No great scratch means not much good; something of little value or importance.
What part of speech is no great scratch?
No great scratch is a phrase.

Words near no great scratch in the dictionary

  1. no good ass
  2. no good asses
  3. no good deed ever goes unpunished
  4. no good deed goes unpunished
  5. no gos
  6. no great scratch
  7. no great shakes
  8. No Gun Ri
  9. no guts, no glory
  10. no hard feelings
  11. no harm done

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: no great scratch (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: “no great scratch.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/no_great_scratch. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.