Word.ws English Dictionary

spitting distance

spitting distance noun: a short distance.

Noun

spitting distance (plural spitting distances)

  1. (idiomatic) A short distance.
    • [N]o less than forty defaulters in the executive, within spitting distance of the President, have not alone been proved so, but still retain their places.1840, A. Traveller, Notes upon Canada and the United States: from 1832 to 1840, Rogers and Thompson (Toronto), p. 180
    • In these craft they risk the extreme perils of the sea. . . . They have been within spitting distance of collision and bumping distance of the bottom.1899 April 27, Rudyard Kipling, quoted in "A Fleet in Being: Men who take their chances," West Coast Times (New Zealand), p. 4 (retrieved 15 Oct 2010)

Examples of spitting distance in a sentence

  • They live within spitting distance of a busy runway at London's Heathrow Airport.1972 September, John Pearson, “Science Worldwide”, in Popular Mechanics, page 36:
  • A thousand cops within spitting distance."2007, Paul Levine, Trial & Error, →ISBN, page 120:

Forms of spitting distance

pluralspitting distances
alternative formshouting distance

Questions about spitting distance

What does spitting distance mean?
Spitting distance means a short distance.
How do you use spitting distance in a sentence?
They live within spitting distance of a busy runway at London's Heathrow Airport.
What part of speech is spitting distance?
Spitting distance is a noun.
What is the plural of spitting distance?
The plural of spitting distance is spitting distances.

Words near spitting distance in the dictionary

  1. spitting blood
  2. spitting box
  3. spitting boxes
  4. spitting cobra
  5. spitting cobras
  6. spitting distance
  7. spitting distances
  8. spitting facts
  9. spitting feathers
  10. spitting fire
  11. spitting image

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: spitting distance (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: En-au-spitting distance.ogg.

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