smoking gun

noun
1.
indisputable proof or evidence of a crime.
Origin
1970-75
Examples from the web for smoking gun
  • The guess here is that minus any forthcoming smoking gun evidence, he will get in.
  • It even has action shots of code that it says are a smoking gun.
  • She intends this to be something of a bombshell: the smoking gun in the form of a spray nozzle, as it were.
  • In lieu of a smoking gun, a more complex picture of autism's environmental causes is now emerging.
  • It is not the smoking gun that one would prefer but it is a place to start.
  • Connect the rise of chemical use with the epidemics in autoimmune disease, and you already have a smoking gun.
  • Climate change is too complex a system to be able to abstract one factor and call it the smoking gun.
  • Insiders crow that the gumshoes found no smoking gun.
  • From the start the mortgage problem is not the only smoking gun.
  • But smoke and a gun are not the same as a smoking gun.
British Dictionary definitions for smoking gun

smoking gun

noun
1.
a piece of irrefutable incriminating evidence
Slang definitions & phrases for smoking gun

smoking gun

noun phrase

Incontestable evidence; the GOODS: They had discovered the ''smoking gun'' that would destroy the general's case/ In fact, there may be no ''smoking gun,'' no incontrovertible, black-and-white evidence of wrongdoing

[1970s+; fr the image of a murderer caught with the fatal smoking firearm still in hand]


Idioms and Phrases with smoking gun

smoking gun

Something that serves as indisputable evidence or proof, especially of a crime. For example, There is no smoking gun in the Oval Office; the President had no role in tampering with the evidence. This expression alludes to the smoke coming from a recently discharged firearm, a normal occurrence until the invention of smokeless powder. [ Mid-1900s ]