Word.ws English Dictionary

slam-bang

slam-bang adjective: noisy, raucous.

Adjective

slam-bang (not comparable)

  1. (onomatopoeic) Noisy, raucous.
    • At a signal from Horko's box there was an all-out, slam-bang, grand salute of the guns and with it a pounding of the deep liquid bass drums.1959, Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King, Penguin Classics, published 1996, →ISBN, page 173
    • Their arguments weren't pleasant to hear or to watch, but they weren't yet having the all-out, slam-bang quarrels they would have when I was older.2001, V. C. Andrews, Cinnamon, Simon and Schuster, →ISBN, page 188
  2. Violent, forceful.
    • "If you had led the rough, tough, slam-bang, every-man-for-himself life I have, you wouldn't be frightened of gorillas...."1932, P. G. Wodehouse, Monkey Business
    • Temporary Agency begins with a tale of demonic possession and adolescent crushes and ends with a slam-bang, all-out global confrontation between the forces of good and evil.2000, Linda Parent Lesher, The Best Novels of the Nineties: A Reader's Guide, McFarland & Company,, →ISBN, page 99
  3. Impressive, exciting.
    • "I'm a real, slam-bang, honest-to-goodness, three-fisted humdinger. I'm a bona fide supraman."1961, Joseph Heller, chapter 2, in Catch-22
    • After this slam-bang production, the next is sure to be a huge letdown.2004 March 18–24, Jack Harvey (pseudonym), "Once Again, Oscar Is King Of The Rings", in The Onion, available in Embedded in America, →ISBN, page 114

Adverb

slam-bang (not comparable)

  1. Shot or hit with a noise.
    • 19th cent., Robert Montgomery Bird, Nick of the Woods, 1967 Rowman & Littlefield edition, →ISBN, page 48,
      Well! as soon as I jumped out of his way, bang went his piece, and bang went another, let fly by an Injun;—down went the Major, shot right through the hips, slam-bang.

Noun

slam-bang (plural slam-bangs)

  1. (onomatopoeic) Noisy activity.
    • From far down the hall came the staccato notes of a new term, the slam-bang of teachers flinging open cabinets, filling trash cans, stapling lists to bulletin boards, dragging desks into optimistic configurations.2005, Monica Wood, Any Bitter Thing: A Novel, Chronicle Books, →ISBN, page 71
    • But James in describing the slam-bang of her upbringing has given us every reason for her turning out crazy, vengeful or anti-social.1985, Paul Theroux, "Introduction", to, Henry James, What Maisie Knew, Penguin Classics, →ISBN, page 13

Verb

slam-bang (third-person singular simple present slam-bangs, present participle slam-banging, simple past and past participle slam-banged)

  1. (informal, transitive) To beat noisily.
    • He was forever slam-banging the microphone stand & twisting the cord around himself.1970-1975, Lou Sullivan, personal diary, quoted in 2019, Ellis Martin, Zach Ozma (editors), We Both Laughed In Pleasure

Examples of slam-bang in a sentence

  • Fifteen years of marriage in full would cry out for a slam-bang celebration.2003, Jacquelyn Mitchard, Christmas, Present, HarperCollins, →ISBN, page 2:
  • The boy seemed streetwise yet clearly unaware that this was an officer whose slam-bang interrogation methods were a legend.2004, Lindsey Davis, Scandal Takes a Holiday, Mysterious Press, →ISBN, page 4:
  • The waiter took my order, a slam-bang something with eggs and pancakes: enough cholesterol to power the whole state of Idaho.2007, John Dunning, The Bookwoman's Last Fling: A Cliff Janeway Novel, Simon and Schuster,, →ISBN, page 2:
  • An eentsy-weentsy office with a slam-bang T1 connection that she couldn't figure out how to hook up to her slam-bang computer that she couldn't figure out how to plug in.2005, John Reed, The Whole, Simon and Schuster, →ISBN, page 43:

Forms of slam-bang

Noun
pluralslam-bangs
Verb
third-person singular presentslam-bangs
present participleslam-banging
past participleslam-banged
pastslam-banged

Questions about slam-bang

What does slam-bang mean?
Slam-bang means noisy, raucous.
How do you use slam-bang in a sentence?
Fifteen years of marriage in full would cry out for a slam-bang celebration.
What part of speech is slam-bang?
Slam-bang can be an adjective, an adverb, a noun or a verb.

Words near slam-bang in the dictionary

  1. slam poetry
  2. slam poets
  3. slam the door
  4. SLAM trap
  5. SLAM traps
  6. slam-bang
  7. slam-banged
  8. slam-banging
  9. slam-bangs
  10. slam-clicker
  11. slam-clickers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: slam-bang (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: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-slam-bang.wav.

Cite this entry: “slam-bang.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/slam-bang. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.