shake a leg

Proposed by a contributor, not yet supported by evidence.

Meaning · English

to hurry up or move quickly

Nghĩa · Tiếng Việt

đi nhanh hoặc di chuyển nhanh

Machine-translated — suggest a fix

Literally: to shake one's leg
Where it’s used: Used Widespread English

Examples

Come on, shake a leg, old son.’
‘ Come on, shake a leg,’ I said.

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

Sources & notes

Listed in Wiktionary’s “English idioms” category (retrieved 2026-07-29); definition pending editorial review. Definition drafted by AI (@cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast) and auto-approved by rule on 2026-07-31; pending editor spot-check.

Common questions

What does “shake a leg” mean?

to hurry up or move quickly Literally: to shake one's leg

Is “shake a leg” formal or informal?

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