to rattle through
1
6.3
- phrasal verb
- Informal
:
hacer rápidamente
- At the meeting, she rattled through the presentation in just ten minutes, leaving no time for questions.
Examples
-
The faerie host hovered in the air just above his hands for the time it would take him to rattle through his old good-nights with Molly, then all of them ascended in a cloud of winged splendor and were lost against the burning circle of the sun.
Fiction book (2000) -
It took me two days, what with changing trains in Denver and spending one miserable night sitting upright in the Pullman coach as we rattled through the Rockies.
Fiction book (2000) -
Huddled on the Number 1 train, she rattled through the entrails of Manhattan to the end of the line: South Ferry.
Fiction book (2000) -
We rattle through the silent, dusty town and find beyond it a garden where a dozen feeble trees have, by constant watering, been induced to grow as high as our heads, but appear discouraged, drooping, and ready to give up the effort at any moment.
Blog text (22) -
The teacher decided to rattle through the syllabus on the last day of school to cover everything before summer break.
-
He rattled through the paperwork so quickly that he missed a few important details.
Synonyms
11
4.8
To say a list of things quickly without thinking much
9
2.8
To look quickly through the pages of a book or magazine
5
3.6
To succeed at something quickly and easily
2
4.9
To do something quickly and well
1
2.7
Read something quickly without looking at details
1
3.8
To read quickly without looking at details
Say a long list quickly from memory
Antonyms
How Quickly
Surface Forms
Morphology
The verb 'rattle' evokes rapid, repeated movement or noise and 'through' conveys completion, so a learner who knows both words could plausibly infer a sense of moving quickly through something. However, the specific pragmatic nuance of doing something "quickly and without pausing" and the idiomatic phrasal-verb usage are metaphorical and not fully predictable for a B1 learner without prior exposure.
Etymology
Rattle through comes from the image of shaking a box so small things rattle and move through quickly, one after another. That fast, noisy movement is why it means 'to do something quickly and without pausing'.