like sardines
4
5.6
- idiom
:
como sardinas
- Packed together like sardines.
- packed like sardines
- crammed like sardines
- like sardines in a can
How do you go from sweating and singing and being packed in together like sardines to the new normal?
- How do you go from sweating and singing and being packed in together like sardines to the new normal?
- And then also, the only other thing that I remember is just standing there just compact like sardines in this box with all these women.
Examples
-
They packed the van like sardines, squeezing in all the equipment for the trip.
-
These places are prisons, and we're packed in there like sardines, fed cheap slop, and worked to the bone 14 hours a day.
-
The music was great, but we were packed like sardines.
Fiction book (1997) -
With that many people packed in like sardines in a can, any place they go is going to be a populated area.
Blog text (20) -
If people want to travel squashed like sardines in a can, they can pay a low price.
Academic text (1997) -
They were packed like sardines in a can at the store.
Fiction book (1992) -
So it's the hottest day on Earth, and we're all packed in my backyard like sardines for this barbecue.
-
We enjoyed ourselves, despite being packed in like sardines, even taking an "anniversary shot" in honor of it being close to the one-year anniversary of Kevin and Jen's courtship beginning.
Blog text (25) -
During the concert, we were all standing like sardines in the crowded venue.
-
The kids were seated like sardines on the bus, with barely any room to move.
Synonyms
30
2.9
In a way that things or people are close together
1
8.2
So full that there is little or no space
Packed very close together so there is almost no space between them
Antonyms
How Crowded
Surface Forms
Morphology
The simile is directly interpretable: if a learner knows 'sardine' (a small fish commonly packed tightly in cans) and the comparison word 'like', they can infer being packed closely together. This image-based comparison is cross-linguistically common and follows a transparent compositional pattern, so the meaning is predictable from the parts.
Etymology
Like sardines comes from the image of small fish, sardines, packed tightly in a tin can so there is almost no space between them, and people pressed together in a train or room look the same. That's why it means 'very crowded'.