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pain in the neck

noun

Etymology

First attested in the 1920s.

Definitions

  1. Someone or something which is annoying, irritating or inconvenient.

    • Got to know McTodd, found he wasn’t coming to the castle, and came down instead of him, same as me. Only he got there first, damn him! Wouldn’t that give you a pain in the neck!”
    • OK, call me a hypersensitive liberal, if you want. It wouldn’t be the first time. I can be a pain in the neck about racial, ethnic and religious bias sometimes, but I think it’s better to be hypersensitive than insensitive.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for pain in the neck. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA