Meaning
To devastate someone - to shock, floor, or thoroughly demoralise them, whether by a physical blow or a piece of news. The phrase is chiefly British and Australian, and it runs both ways: a batsman hits the ball for six, but a person is hit for six by life. Cricketing countries use it freely; elsewhere it may need the game explained. 'Knock for six' is the commoner British form for shocks. Regional use: Chiefly British and Australian English.
Origin
From cricket, where six runs - the maximum from a single delivery - are scored when the batsman sends the ball over the boundary without its bouncing, and a bowler thus treated has been publicly dismantled. The Phrase Finder's citation trail shows the phrase growing inside the game: in 1847 Bell's Life in London praised Sewell's 'brilliant hit for six', with hit as a noun; by 1866 the Naval and Military Gazette had the verb form, mourning a batsman bowled by a ball anyone else would have 'hit for six'. The figurative leap came in May 1937, when the Times Literary Supplement wrote of Lawrence being chiefly concerned to 'hit swots and cads and foreigners for six'. Dictionaries mark the idiom primarily British, with a double sense - being greatly surprised, and having a plan destroyed - and British audiences got a modern tutorial in it from the opening credits of the BBC's Gone Fishing, in which a triple heart bypass is described as having knocked the presenter for six.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- hit someone for six
- knock someone for six
- knocked for six
Usage Examples
- The closure notice hit the workforce for six: three hundred jobs, six weeks, no consultation.
- She was knocked for six by the diagnosis and back at her desk inside a fortnight.
- Bad light had stopped play for an hour, and the declaration then hit the tourists for six in both senses.