What it means
Means something’s excellent or a proper success. It’s an old-school, slightly posh bit of British enthusiasm, the sort your gran drops when the kettle’s on and the biscuits are still crisp. These days you’ll hear it at work or down the pub, said straight or with a wink when things are only just alright. Instant mood-lift.
Usage examples
"Sorted the dodgy boiler off a YouTube tutorial, mate. Smashing. Put the kettle on, made a brew, and strutted round like I’m the heating engineer."
"The roast lunch at the Cotswold inn was absolutely smashing, the beef came out pink in the middle, the Yorkshire puddings were the size of a small saucer, and the gravy boat needed refilling twice before the apple crumble arrived from the kitchen."
"My niece passed her A-level chemistry exam with a smashing A star, she had been revising at the kitchen table since the second week of January, and now the whole family is helping her plan the celebration trip to Edinburgh for the long August weekend."
Where it comes from
Smashing in the sense of excellent dates from the late nineteenth-century British boxing press, where a smashing performance described a knockout of devastating force. The metaphor migrated from the ring to the music hall and the early cinema halls of Edwardian England, where smashing show became the default critic verdict of approval. By the nineteen-thirties the word had drifted into general British speech as the polite alternative to the stronger superlatives, and survived the cynical post-war decades because it sounded breezy, optimistic and impossible to take ironically. The Frank Hampson Eagle comic strip of the nineteen-fifties cemented smashing in a generation of British boys’ vocabulary.
Other ways to say it
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