Meanings
- alternativeAlternative form of have nothing on.
The old boy who cut the knot and made himself famous didn't have anything on me. If you've ever stuck your tongue onto an iron pump handle in winter you can get some idea of how comfortable I felt when the Chief gave me a job that would have made Hercules's stable stunt look like a game of parchesi.
1918 July 29, “With the Tong Gangs in Winter”, in Sinclair's Magazine, volume 1, number 12, page 262 more examples
ENG. Billy, I beg of you not to excite yourself! You fully realize how necessary it is for you to be calm. Ned says you are a whole lot better. Don't undo what he has done for you. If you will just make up a little more sleep — HAST. A little more sleep? What do you think I am? Sleep? Why, Rip Van Winkle didn't have anything on me!
1915, Gladys Ruth Bridgham, “Act 1”, in On the Quiet: A Comedy in Two Acts, Walter H. Baker and Company, page 4Well, in those days I used to hear about people who went to hotels for meals and even now and then attended a theatrical performance at a dollar or so a throw, and it once reached me that a second cousin of a friend of my sister's husband had actually put up at the Waldorf-Astoria for ten dollars a day! There was nothing like that in mine. I was the original nickel-shaver, and Hetty Green in her palmiest days didn't have anything on me in parsimonious living, except that she didn't have to do it and I did.
1919 October 3, “Local Manipulation”, in The Amateur Photographer's Weekly, volume 15, number 378, page 273
Cite this entry
not have anything on. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 5, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/not%20have%20anything%20on
“not have anything on.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/not%20have%20anything%20on. Accessed November 5, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “not have anything on,” accessed November 5, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/not%20have%20anything%20on.
Source: not have anything on on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.