swiss cheese
noun · verb
Simple meaning
Hard pale yellow cheese with many holes from Switzerland.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
swischeezSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
ˈswɪsˈtʃiz
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
noun
informal
Hard pale yellow cheese with many holes from Switzerland
colloquial
By extension, any cheese which resembles Emmentaler, especially ones with holes.
figurativecolloquial
Something that is full of holes or vulnerabilities.
verb
(transitive, slang, African-American Vernacular, usually passive voice) To murder (someone) by shooting them full of holes; to shoot (someone) many times.
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: Hard pale yellow cheese with many holes from Switzerland
Used this way, swiss cheese is a reasonably familiar word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. It turns up most in everyday conversation and social media or informal writing contexts.
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Casual
- Intensity
- Not strongly marked
- How common
- Moderately common
- Connotation
- Playful
- Usage feel
- Casual and conversational
Where it naturally appears
- Everyday conversation
- Social media/informal writing
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.