By The Skin of Your Teeth : Phrases, Clichés, Expressions & Sayings

By The Skin of Your Teeth

By The Skin of Your Teeth : Phrases

Meaning:

Narrowly; barely. Usually used in regard to a narrow escape from a disaster.

Example:

Origin:

The phrase first appears in English in the Geneva Bible, 1560, in Job 19:20, which provides a literal translation of the original Hebrew:

"I haue escaped with the skinne of my tethe."

Teeth don't have skin, of course, so the writer may have been alluding to the teeth's surface or simply to a notional minute measure - something that might now be referred to, with less poetic imagery then the biblical version, as 'as small as the hairs on a gnat's bollock'.

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