Word.ws English Dictionary

tell it to Sweeney

tell it to Sweeney phrase: i do not believe what you said.

Phrase

tell it to Sweeney

  1. (colloquial, dated, idiomatic) I do not believe what you said.

Synonyms of tell it to Sweeney

Origin of tell it to Sweeney

"Tell it to Sweeney! (The Stuyvesants will understand.)” was an advertisement for the New York (NY) Daily News, first appearing in August 1922. The Daily News positioned itself as the newspaper of the average working man—such as the Irish “Sweeney.” The name “Stuyvesant” was used to represent blue bloods. Thus, if you advertise in the Daily News and reach the Sweeneys of New York City, the Stuyvesants will also get the message.

Questions about tell it to Sweeney

What does tell it to Sweeney mean?
Tell it to Sweeney means i do not believe what you said.
What part of speech is tell it to Sweeney?
Tell it to Sweeney is a phrase.

Words near tell it to Sweeney in the dictionary

  1. Tell City
  2. Tell el-Amarna
  3. Tell el-Muqayyar
  4. tell fortunes
  5. tell it like it is
  6. tell it to Sweeney
  7. tell it to the hand
  8. tell it to the judge
  9. tell it to the marines
  10. tell its own story
  11. tell its own tale

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tell it to Sweeney (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-tell it to Sweeney.ogg.

Cite this entry: “tell it to Sweeney.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/tell_it_to_sweeney. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.