spit venom

spit venom (third-person singular simple present spits venom, present participle spitting venom, simple past and past participle spat venom or spit venom)

1. To show great anger or contempt, usually in speech.

   Synonyms: spit nails, spit blood, spit tacks, spit chips, spit feathers

   • 1982 April, Virginia Woolf, An Unwritten Novel, in A Haunted House and Other Short Stories, Granada Publishing, page 16:

     Her lips pursed as if to spit venom at the word; pursed they remained. All she did was to take her glove and rub hard at a spot on the window-pane.

   • 2006, Natasha Oakley, chapter 3, in Millionaire Dad: Wife Needed, Mills & Boon, page 72:

     For some reason it hurt that he didn’t trust her. She’d had people spit venom at her, but this bothered her more because it was so unwarranted. As far as she knew, she’d never met him before yesterday, had never met anyone who knew him well. So why?

   • 2009, Bulbul Sharma, chapter 9, in Eating Women, Telling Tales: Stories about Food, Zubaan Books, page 107:

     When his mother had been alive, she would join in too and together they would eat and spit venom at her. She had a sharper tongue and sharper memory and could even say on which date at what hour her father had let them down.

• “spit blood venom”, in Cambridge English Dictionary, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire: Cambridge University Press, 1999–present.
• “spit venom”, in Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1996–present.