English · Idiom Candidate

spit the dummy

Proposed by a contributor, not yet supported by evidence.

Both English Tiếng Việt

Meaning · English

to suddenly become angry or upset

Nghĩa · Tiếng Việt

bỗng dưng trở nên giận dữ hoặc bối rối

Machine-translated — suggest a fix

Literally: spit out a pacifier

Where it’s used: Used Widespread English

Examples

' It is no use me spitting out my dummy, ' he said, borrowing a a popular Australian phrase.

The anti - Dickson camp chortled for hours in the bar about how the boy ‘ spat the dummy’.

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 “spit the dummy” mean?

to suddenly become angry or upset Literally: spit out a pacifier

Is “spit the dummy” formal or informal?

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

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