First recorded in 1935–40
First recorded in 1955–60
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
To earn it the investigators must appear every day to be clean as a hound’s tooth.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 15, 2017
A "sense of Congress" resolution with no legal force, the code urges officials to be loyal, hardworking, fair, clean as a hound's tooth.
From Time Magazine Archive
Ike was at first undecided about whether or not to drop his running mate and told reporters that anyone on his ticket would have to prove himself "clean as a hound's tooth."
From Time Magazine Archive
Preferring hound's tooth jackets and mixed tweeds to ambassadorial tails, he would sooner talk on Scottish wild flowers and Chinese porcelains than on politics and policies.
From Time Magazine Archive
In business a week and he's made over four hundred dollars already, neat and nice, and as clean as a hound's tooth!
From Cappy Ricks Or, the Subjugation of Matt Peasley by Kyne, Peter B. (Peter Bernard)
Agee saw an “arrogant neophyte” and a film that had been constructed around her as snugly as the form-fitting hound’s-tooth suit she wears so well.
From New York Times ● Aug. 13, 2014
"It's inevitable," said a tall Tanganyikan in hound's-tooth tweeds.
From Time Magazine Archive
An evangelist's accounting Billy Graham has always endeavored to be hound's-tooth clean about money.
From Time Magazine Archive
Delaware's hound's-tooth polisher, Republican John J. Williams, led a parade of five Republican Senators provisionally suggesting an Adams resignation.
From Time Magazine Archive
All he did was thank me for letting him wear my hound's-tooth.
From "The Catcher in the Rye" by J. D. Salinger
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
