Fort Knox
- noun
- /fɔrt nɑks/
- Currently, Ron Paul is working on a bill to audit Fort Knox.
Examples
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We turned our home into a place as secure as Fort Knox to protect our valuables.
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If you explode it in Fort Knox, the entire gold supply of the United States will be radioactive for 57 years.
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This is my bank, the gold depository at Fort Knox, gentlemen.
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Nobody has ever seen the gold in Fort Knox in the last 40 years because it is so secretive.
Blog text (3) -
"We were targeting Kentucky the whole time because of Fort Knox and Fort Campbell.
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But bringing it to Fort Knox undetected could be risky, very risky.
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Rob currently serves in the U.S. Army as a public affairs noncommissioned officer stationed at Fort Knox, KY.
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Digging gold out of the ground only to hide it back underground in a vault such as that at Fort Knox is one of the stupidest things people do.
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We here at the Bank of England, Mr. Bond, are the official depository for gold bullion just as Fort Knox, Kentucky, is for the United States.
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Guarded like the gold in Fort Knox is supposed to be (but actually isn't), and we have verifiable counts done under the watchful eye of members of all interested parties; we will never have failed elections again.
Blog text (2)
Synonyms
A strong locked room or digital place for keeping valuable things safe
A safe place where people keep documents or other valuable items
A strong, secure room in a bank that holds money, valuable things, and important papers
A room or building where people keep money and valuable things safe
A protected place where people hide to be safe from attack
How Secure
Surface Forms
Morphology
fort + Knox
The constituent 'fort' clearly signals a fortified, secure place so a learner who knows the words could infer a general sense of security. However, 'Knox' is a proper name and the specific idiomatic meaning 'extremely secure' depends on cultural knowledge of the US site rather than purely compositional meaning, so the expression is only partially predictable.
Etymology
Fort Knox comes from a real American fort called Knox, where a huge amount of the country's gold was kept behind thick walls and many guards in a strong vault. So people call any place or system 'very secure' or hard to get into a Fort Knox.