English · Word pair Candidate

bow and scrape

Proposed by a contributor, not yet supported by evidence.

Both English Tiếng Việt

Meaning · English

show excessive respect or try too hard to please someone

Nghĩa · Tiếng Việt

thể hiện sự tôn trọng quá mức hoặc cố gắng quá hard để làm hài lòng ai đó

Machine-translated — suggest a fix

Literally: make a bow and scrape the floor

Where it’s used: Used Widespread English

Examples

A gaoler led them into the porter's lodge, the fellow bowing and scraping as he recognised Sir John.

Unless you'd rather we all bowed and scraped and addressed you by your noble title, Roman!’

British National Corpus sentence via the MAGPIE corpus (CC BY 4.0, retrieved 2026-07-30)

Sources & notes

Listed on Wikipedia “Irreversible binomial” (CC BY-SA 4.0, retrieved 2026-07-29). Definition drafted by AI (@cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast) and auto-approved by rule on 2026-07-30; pending editor spot-check.

Common questions

What does “bow and scrape” mean?

show excessive respect or try too hard to please someone Literally: make a bow and scrape the floor

Is “bow and scrape” formal or informal?

No register label has been reviewed yet — treat it as neutral and check the usage notes above.

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