lick and a promise
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.72 in modern English
26
Scrabble Score
15
Letters
2
Syllables
13
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
The hasty or incomplete performance of a task, done with the intention ("a promise") of thorough completion later.
Example Sentences
- "My grandparents called me only an hour before they decided to come visit, so I had to give the dirty living room a lick and a promise."
- "She'd given her face a lick and a promise, drawn her hair back tight and walked in."
- "He never felt quite clean with “cat baths”—as Marcel called them, or “a lick and a promise,” the way Renaud put it."
- "She had not had time for a proper bath in the week since this journey had begun. She had been forced to bathe in the washbasins of the inns along the route, giving herself what her old nursemaid would have called “a lick and a promise.”"
- "Now this is not the way to get a house in order. What this place needs is a real thorough old-fashioned cleaning. A lick and a promise won't do, no, sir!"
- "The snowplows had made what Myles would call a lick-and-a-promise attempt to partially clear the accumulated snow from West End Avenue."
Inflected Forms
a lick and a promise (canonical)