like a house afire/on fire
like a house afire/on fire
Very quickly and efficiently; very well. The simile is based on how houses made of timber or thatch burn very fast, as was the case with the log cabins of American pioneers. Washington Irving used the expression in Knickerbocker’s History of New York (1809), “At it they went like five hundred houses on fire,” and Dickens is quoted as having used it to mean very well (“I am getting on . . . like ‘a house on fire’”) in a letter of 1837.
See also: afire, fire, house, like, on
The Dictionary of Clichés by Christine Ammer
- red flag/rag to a bull, like a
- like a chicken with its head cut off, (run about)
- like a bump on a log
- take to it like a duck to water, to
- bellow like a (wounded) bull, to
- live like a prince, to
- in short order
- slow as (slower than) molasses (in January)
- quake/shake like a leaf, to
- like a dose of salts