Lombard Street to a China orange

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English

Alternative forms

all Lombard Street to a China orange
all Lombard Street to a china orange
Lombard-street to a China orange

Etymology

Lombard Street as a metonym for all the money in British banks. A China orange as something of trifling value.^[1]

Noun

Lombard Street to a China orange (uncountable)

(figurative, dated) very long odds (in favour or against an outcome)
- 1885 John Conroy Hutcheson On Board the Esmeralda (Chapter Fifteen. “A Little Unpleasantness.”)
  As Jorrocks expressed it, in the event of such a catastrophe happening, “It was all Lombard Street to a China orange we’d lose the number of our mess and sarve as food for fishes!”
- 1906, Burford Delannoy, chapter XXIII, in Prince Charlie:
  The odds, too, are against a drunkard's reformation; all Lombard Street to a China orange.
- 1907 Herbert M. Vaughan, The Naples Riviera (Chapter II "The Vesuvian Shore and Monte Sant' Angelo")
  Mora has been a favourite recreation with these people almost from their cradles, and he would be a bold man indeed who would venture to challenge a Torrese at this game, for the native's skill and experience are almost bound to tell eventually in his favour, and the odds are "Lombard Street to a China orange" against the outside player.
- 1937, Sir Malcolm Campbell, The Roads and the Problem of their Safety, London: Hutchinson, page 151:
  It looked the proverbial Lombard Street to a china orange that he must be run down and killed. By a superlatively skilful piece of driving, the bus-driver just managed to avoid him[.]

References

^ Alenka Vrbinc, A Cross-linguistic and Cross-cultural Analysis of English and Slovene Onomastic Phraseological Units p.117 (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019) →ISBN

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