Contextualizebeta

sure-fire

adj

Etymology

From sure + fire, originally used to denote the efficacy of firearms (rifles) to fire.

  1. inherited from *péh₂wr̥✻
  2. inherited from *fōr✻ — “fire”
  3. inherited from *fuir✻
  4. inherited from fȳr — “fire”
  5. inherited from fyr
  6. formed as sure-fire — “sure + fire”

Definitions

  1. Guaranteed to work or happen.

    • That hat should be a sure-fire way to spot him in a crowd.
    • […] just as he knew that showing up for lunch with a brown bag full of dried squirrel jerky and mushrooms and lemongrass was a surefire way to end up social roadkill in the high school hierarchy, […]
    • There certainly looks to be a whole clutch of sure-fire winners among the 11 promised new productions.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for sure-fire. 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