all over hell's half acre
- idiom
- Informal
:
por todas partes
- He drove all over hell's half acre looking for an open gas station late at night.
Examples
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We searched all over hell's half acre for that missing report but never found it.
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Their kids were running all over hell's half acre during the family picnic.
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He was looking for his keys all over hell's half acre!
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The kids were running all over hell's half acre during the picnic.
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He drove all over hell's half acre looking for an open gas station late at night.
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We searched all over hell's half acre for that missing report but never found it.
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He was looking for his keys all over hell's half acre!
Synonyms
283
4.8
In a confused, disorganized way with things or thoughts scattered
In a hurried, confused way
In a confused, hurried way with no order
Antonyms
How Widespread
Surface Forms
Morphology
all + over + hell's + half + acre
The element 'all over' transparently means 'throughout' or 'everywhere', but 'hell's half acre' is an idiomatic, culturally marked place phrase whose meaning ('a rough, chaotic area' or intensifier) cannot be reliably derived from 'hell' + 'half' + 'acre'. A B1 learner who knows the individual words would likely guess a general 'everywhere' sense but not the colloquial, emphatic nuance, so the expression is only partially predictable.
Etymology
The phrase all over hell's half acre may come from a strange old place name, hell's half acre, used for a small, rough area where people and things were spread in all directions. So all over hell's half acre now means 'everywhere' or 'in a messy, frantic way'.