Word.ws English Dictionary

no great shakes

no great shakes noun: something unexceptional, not noteworthy or special.

Noun

no great shakes (uncountable)

  1. (idiomatic) Something unexceptional, not noteworthy or special.
    • You're welcome to stay here, but this hut ain't no great shakes for such as you.1898, Gertrude Atherton, chapter XIX, in The Valiant Runaways, New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, →OCLC, page 210
    • His tactic of pointing out the flaws of the Democrats does not mean that the Republican Party is any great shakes, as he intimates.1980 August 30, Patrice Keegan, “Ebersole Misses the Point”, in Gay Community News, volume 8, number 6, page 4

no great shakes meaning in Bengali and Malayalam

no great shakes in Bengali

উল্লেখযোগ্য নয়, বিশেষ নয়

no great shakes in Malayalam

unexceptional, not very good, unmemorable
വലിയ പ്രാധാന്യമില്ലാത്ത, അത്ര കേമമല്ലാത്ത, അത്ര നല്ലതല്ലാത്ത, അത്ര വെദഗ്ദ്ധ്യമില്ലാത്ത, കാര്യമായിട്ടൊന്നുമില്ലാത്ത, വെറും സാധാരണമായ

Examples of no great shakes in a sentence

  • The iPhone's 2.0 megapixel camera is no great shakes, but it's good enough as cellphone cameras go.2008 August 24, “Your definitive guide to the iPhone”, in The Times, Johannesburg, South Africa, archived from the original on 15 Sep 2008:
  • Haiti were no great shakes but they were getting on top.2026 June 14, Tom English, “Why Haiti v Scotland was antidote to the ills of world football”, in BBC Sport:

Synonyms of no great shakes

Questions about no great shakes

What does no great shakes mean?
No great shakes means something unexceptional, not noteworthy or special.
What is no great shakes in Bengali?
No great shakes in Bengali is উল্লেখযোগ্য নয়, বিশেষ নয়. See No great shakes meaning in Bengali.
How do you use no great shakes in a sentence?
The iPhone's 2.0 megapixel camera is no great shakes, but it's good enough as cellphone cameras go.
What part of speech is no great shakes?
No great shakes is a noun.

Words near no great shakes in the dictionary

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

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: no great shakes (page history and authors); no great shakes (Bengali Wiktionary) (page history and authors); no great shakes (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license). 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:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-no great shakes.ogg.

Cite this entry: “no great shakes.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/no_great_shakes. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.