Word.ws English Dictionary

thick and fast

thick and fast adverb: occurring in large numbers and rapidly.

Adverb

thick and fast (not comparable)

  1. Occurring in large numbers and rapidly.
    • Near-synonyms: thick on the ground, common, widespread, abundant; ubiquitous
    • He sobbed[…]but he forgave them. Then the sobs came thick and fast.1876, Mark Twain [pseudonym; Samuel Langhorne Clemens], chapter 13, in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Hartford, Conn.: The American Publishing Company, →OCLC, pages 113–114

Examples of thick and fast in a sentence

  • […] in view of the many events which were crowding thick and fast in Paris just then[…]1905 January 12, Baroness Orczy [i.e., Emma Orczy], The Scarlet Pimpernel, popular edition, London: Greening & Co., published 20 March...
  • There were three or four inches of fresh snow on the ground, and the flakes were falling thick and fast.1905 April–October, Upton Sinclair, chapter XIX, in The Jungle, New York, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Company, published 26 February 1906...
  • Bubbles are coming thick and fast these days.2026 February 21, David Streitfeld, “People Loved the Dot-Com Boom. The A.I. Boom, Not So Much.”, in The New York Times, →ISSN:

Synonyms of thick and fast

Antonyms

All synonyms and antonyms of thick and fast

Questions about thick and fast

What does thick and fast mean?
Thick and fast means occurring in large numbers and rapidly.
How do you use thick and fast in a sentence?
[…] in view of the many events which were crowding thick and fast in Paris just then[…]
What part of speech is thick and fast?
Thick and fast is an adverb.

Words near thick and fast in the dictionary

  1. thicc
  2. thiccer
  3. thiccest
  4. thiccness
  5. thick
  6. thick and fast
  7. thick and thin
  8. thick and threefold
  9. thick around the middle
  10. thick as a brick
  11. thick as a plank

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: thick and fast (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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