child's play
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English[edit]
Etymology[edit]
From child + -’s + play, originally referring literally to play by a child.[1]
Pronunciation[edit]
- (Received Pronunciation, General American) IPA(key): /ˈt͡ʃaɪldz ˌpleɪ/
Audio (AU) (file)
Noun[edit]
- (idiomatic) Something particularly easy or simple.
- Synonyms: kid stuff, piece of cake
- Compared to my last job, this is child’s play.
- 1839 (indicated as 1840), Thomas Carlyle, “Laissez-Faire”, in Chartism, London: James Fraser, […], →OCLC, pages 52–53:
- The brawny craftsman finds it no child's play to mould his unpliant rugged masses; neither is guidance of men a dilettantism: what it becomes when treated as a dilettantism, we may see!
- 1849, Thomas Babington Macaulay, chapter III, in The History of England from the Accession of James II, volume I, London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, →OCLC, page 322:
- In every county there were elderly gentlemen who had seen service which was no child's play.
- 1914, Robert Frost, “A Servant to Servants”, in North of Boston, London: David Nutt […], →OCLC, page 74:
- He'd pull his bars apart like bow and bow-string, / And let them go and make them twang until / His hands had worn them smooth as any ox-bow. / And then he'd crow as if he thought that child's play— / The only fun he had.
- 1949 January–February, F. G. Roe, “I Saw Three Englands–1”, in The Railway Magazine, London: Tothill Press, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 11:
- I knew something of the railway engineer's uncanny genius for finding a path through such barriers if any path existed; yet I also knew the path would be no child's play.
Translations[edit]
something particularly easy or simple
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See also[edit]
References[edit]
- ^ “child’s play, n.”, in OED Online
, Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, July 2023; “child’s play, phrase”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.
Further reading[edit]
Child's Play (disambiguation) on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
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- en:Children