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red-handed

aggettivoattestato nei dialoghi

  • Australia

Showing clear evidence of guilt; in the act of wrongdoing.

aggettivo

  1. 1

    Showing clear evidence of guilt; in the act of wrongdoing.

    to catch red-handed

    Caught, red-handed, on the spot, in the very act of aiding and abetting the traitors against the Republic of France, the Englishman could claim no protection from his own country.

    Railway police are making a full investigation into the matter, and the headmasters of schools have been approached, but it is difficult in such cases to discover the culprits, unless they are caught red-handed.

    Another Southerner argued that "commerce has no social illusions" and that it would be commerce that would rid the region of "this historic, red-handed, deformed, and swaggering villain."

  2. 2

    Deadly, bloody.

    The demon of fire followed close upon the heels of the unseen fiend of the earth's hidden caverns, and ran red-handed through the metropolis of the West, kindling a thousand unhurt buildings, while the horror-stricken people stood aghast in terror, as helpless to combat this new enemy as they were to check the ravages of the earthquake itself.

    I grew to manhood listening to Greeks and Persians plotting various plots in my master's house, and one night all the plots burst forth into ugly blossoms and bore the fruit of red-handed war, and the Greek cities of Ionia revolted against the Persian overlords.

    He sees in Conan a red-handed, rough-footed barbarian who came out of the north to plunder a civilized land.

  3. 3

    informaleWith hands that are red from blood.

    The blisters had wept blood for a while, leaving him literally red-handed for the rest of the night.

    A red-handed cleaning lady slopped a wet, ragged mop.

Etimologia

From red + handed, likening to a murderer with their hands red with the victim's blood. The phrase to be taken with red hand originally meant "to be caught in the act". The use of red hand in this sense dates back to at least the 15th century in medieval Scotland and Scots law. Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe (1819) contains the first recorded use of taken red-handed for someone apprehended in the act of committing a crime. The expression subsequently became more common as caught red-handed.

Forme

comparativo
more red-handed
superlativo
most red-handed
Le pagine vicineL'ordine alfabetico segue le regole della lingua, non il valore dei byte: un accento distingue soltanto due parole per il resto identiche, e lo spagnolo tratta la Ñ come una lettera a sé.

Contenuto lessicale tratto da Wiktionary, sotto licenza CC BY-SA 4.0 · Voce di origine · Versione dei dati 2026-08-23

Posizione tra le parole del corpus OpenSubtitles 2018 — sottotitoli di film e serie, quindi lingua parlata e non scritta (CC BY-SA 3.0).