sockdolager

American  

[sok-dol-uh-jer] / sɒkˈdɒl ə dʒər /

noun

Older Slang.

1. something unusually large, heavy, etc.

2. a decisive reply, argument, etc.

3. a heavy, finishing blow.

   His right jab is a real sockdolager.

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Usage

Where does sockdolager come from? Sockdolager, meaning a "decisive blow or remark," is a 19th-century American original. The origin of such silly-sounding words like sockdolager are, often, sometimes just that—a fanciful act of silliness.However, it's sometimes claimed (though etymologists aren't convinced of this theory) that the word combines sock ("to strike or hit") with doxology, "a hymn or phrase praising God."A form of the word sockdolager in the play Our American Cousin may have been one of the last words President Abraham Lincoln heard right before he was assassinated in 1865.Many more amusing Americanisms await in our slideshow "These Wacky Words Originated In The USA."

Etymology

Origin of sockdolager

1820–30, sock ² + -dolager, of uncertain origin

Example Sentences

It also includes “absquatulate,” ”anathema,” ”epigone,” ”puerile,” ”rumpus,” ”sockdolager,” ”sybaritic,” ”torpid” and “turpitude.”

From Washington Times

The impassable barrage comes a hundred feet below the point where the left-hand torrent precipitates itself at right-angles into the current of the right-hand one, and the two lines of whirlpools converge in a “V” and form one big walloping sockdolager.

From Project Gutenberg

Now 1,540 pages, with 22,500 quotations, it is a sockdolager, Nearly 3,000 of the quotations are new| to this edition, ranging from the maxims of Ptahhotpe, an Egyptian vizier of the 24th century B.C.

From Time Magazine Archive

Gore said he hoped the argument would make no more than "an inconsequential ripple in the flowing tide of rhetoric which I have . . . enjoyed exchanging with the inimitable and euphonious sockdolager from Illinois."

From Time Magazine Archive

This had to be the greatest sockdolager since Goebbels explained Stalingrad.

From Project Gutenberg