kick the can down the road
"kick-the-can-down-the-road" is a 21-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“kick the can down the road” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a verb. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 26
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - To avoid or postpone a decision or action; to procrastinate.
Corpus desk
Index EN-kick-the-can-down-the-ro · kick the can down the road · English
kick the can down the road · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 26 letters
- VOW-7 7 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "K" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | kick the can down the road |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| Letters | 26 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “kick the can down the road” in English
Rare enough to double-check
kick the can down the road is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as averb. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "To avoid or postpone a decision or action; to procrastinate.".
Zero misspellings are on record for kick the can down the road in our index, and the word's spelling is regular enough that our generator found nothing worth flagging. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.
Etymologically, the entry records: Attested as an activity of idle urban youths since the late 19th century. The modern sense of procrastinate dates from the 1980s. The correct English form is kick the can down the road, spelled K-I-C-K- -T-H-E- -C-A-N- -D-O-W-N- -T-H-E- -R-O-A-D.
Definition
- 1To avoid or postpone a decision or action; to procrastinate.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how kick the can down the road appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
Ronald Lehman, deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategic and theater nuclear bombs, said the United States was satisfied with its land-based deterrent for many years and "there was a tendency to kick the can down the road and not pay enough attention to its problems.
To continue haggling over points on which a consensus seems impossible, Lehman said, is to "just keep kicking the can down the road."
Etymology
Attested as an activity of idle urban youths since the late 19th century. The modern sense of procrastinate dates from the 1980s.
This word in other languages
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.