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pip to the post. In DICTIOUS you will not only get to know all the dictionary meanings for the word
pip to the post, but we will also tell you about its etymology, its characteristics and you will know how to say
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English
Pronunciation
Verb
pip to the post (third-person singular simple present pips to the post, present participle pipping to the post, simple past and past participle pipped to the post)
- (idiomatic, sports) To overcome a strong competitor in a sporting event, especially by gaining a small advantage at the last decisive moment.
2012 June 23, Simon Usborne, The Independent, article title:"Pipped to the post: What happens to famous athletes who just miss a place on the podium?" (end of the title) A place on the podium can be missed by tiny fractions – and finish a career. Simon Usborne talks to some famous Olympian losers about the moment their dream ended.
- (idiomatic) To overcome a prominent competitor, gaining their position, especially by making a smart, sudden move.
1988 January 4, A Soap That Stings, New York Magazine, page 14:What may bar EastEnders from acceptance in the U.S. is not immorality but unintelligibility. PBS may even distribute a glossary of Cockney phrases so that Americans will know what a character means when he or she is "over the moon," "skint," "pipped to the post," or "in the club" (happy, broke, defeated, or pregnant).
2004, Iwan Rhys Morus, When Physics Became King, page 158:Both were pipped to the post in 1888 by the German physicist Heinrich Hertz, a student of Hermann von Helmholtz (himself one of the towering figures of nineteenth-century German physics) who announced to the world that he had found a way of propagating and detecting these long-sought-for electromagnetic waves.
See also