DICTIONARY · CC-CEDICT
靴子落地
Mandarin · pinyin xuē zi luò dì
Meanings
- (lit.) the boot hits the floor (idiom)
- (fig.) a much-anticipated, impactful development has finally occurred (an allusion to a joke from the 1950s in which a young man would take off a boot and throw it onto the floor, waking the old man sleeping downstairs who could then not get back to sleep until he had heard the second boot hit the floor)
Characters in this entry
Explore the spelling
Mandarin tones
1–5–4–4 · xue1 zi5 luo4 di4
Compare attested words with these syllables ↗Dictionary tones. Connected speech can change their realization.
Connected dictionary
4character links
Counts describe dictionary records, not word frequency or semantic similarity. Source identities stay separate.Read this spelling in Classical texts
Follow a written form into the eight pinned witnesses: Analects, Mencius, Laozi, Zhuangzi, Xunzi, Han Feizi, Sunzi and the Mao Shijing. A match is a place to investigate; it does not prove that a modern dictionary sense fits the passage.
Compare dictionary sources Wiktionary · 1 sense
Wiktionary English definitions · Chinese section
Independent source senses for this spelling, with usage labels retained. Not matched to the pronunciation above.
phrase
- Something that is anticipated but not fully certain happens.
Source page · dump 2026-09-02 · Contributors & history
Wiktionary contributors · CC BY-SA 4.0 · source & license · Data pack