Contextualizebeta

smoking gun

noun

Etymology

Often traced back to the Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Gloria Scott.

Definitions

  1. Evidence, particularly of a crime, that is difficult or impossible to dispute.

    • We have a theory, but we haven't found a smoking gun yet.
    • When Prophet's place in Decatur, Georgia was raided in July 1989, there was the E911 Document, a smoking gun. And there was Prophet in the hands of the Secret Service, doing his best to "explain."
    • I now turn to the role and results of our current inspections. Evidently if we had found any ‘smoking gun’ we would have reported it to the Council.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for smoking gun. 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