knock at the door

knock at the door

1. To present (itself) as a possibility or (usually desirable) opportunity in the near future, especially temporarily. It was hard leaving my parents and all my friends from high school, but when an opportunity to attend school in Europe knocked at the door, I knew I had to seize the chance. What would you do if the chance to make half a million dollars was suddenly knocking at the door?
2. To try to become involved in some group or venture. If that kid is knocking at the door, you better let him join the team—he's really talented.
3. To be close to overtaking a competitor. Philly still sits atop the division, but Boston is knocking at the door with this win streak.
See also: door, knock
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.
See also:
  • knock on the door
  • knock at (one's) door
  • knock at your door
  • knock on (one's) door
  • come knocking at (one's) door
  • come knocking on (one's) door
  • come knocking on the door
  • come knocking at the door
  • be knocking on the door
  • step outside
References in classic literature
THE knock at the door was repeated--a louder knock than before.
"I warned ye baith, it was a clean impossibility to knock at the door this time.
There was another knock at the door. As Arnold had predicted, the landlady made her appearance on the scene.
Then there was a knock at the door and Griffiths, healthy, strong, and cheerful, came in.
They tell Sarah Jane to knock at the door and call them, and Sarah Jane does knock at the door and does call them, and they grunt back "awri" and then go comfortably to sleep again.
Mr Haredale threw himself from his horse, but he had no need to knock at the door, for it was already open, and there stood upon the step a portly old man, with a very red, or rather purple face, who with an anxious expression of countenance, was remonstrating with some unseen personage upstairs, while the porter essayed to close the door by degrees and get rid of him.
The next day, just as the princess had sat down to dinner, she heard a strange noise--tap, tap--plash, plash--as if something was coming up the marble staircase: and soon afterwards there was a gentle knock at the door, and a little voice cried out and said:
That the place could possibly be, without her, was something my mind seemed unable to compass; and whereas she had seldom or never been in my thoughts of late, I had now the strangest ideas that she was coming towards me in the street, or that she would presently knock at the door. In my rooms too, with which she had never been at all associated, there was at once the blankness of death and a perpetual suggestion of the sound of her voice or the turn of her face or figure, as if she were still alive and had been often there.
Anne was considering whether she should venture to suggest that a gown, or a cap, would not be liable to any such misuse, when a knock at the door suspended everything.
The 36-year-old used to repeatedly knock at the door and run away, according to records, before the brother came out to confront him and they indulged in a physical altercation.
Ten minutes later there was another knock at the door and the truck driver's partner found him in a pool of blood in a nearby alley.
Synopsis: Disputing the so-called ghetto studies that depicted the early part of the twentieth century as the nadir of African American society, "Knock at the Door of Opportunity: Black Migration to Chicago, 1900-1919" investigates black life in turn-of-the-century Chicago, revealing a vibrant community that grew and developed on Chicago's South Side in the early 1900s.
A few minutes later there was another knock at the door. The elderly woman was confronted by two young men, one with a scarf wrapped around his face and brandishing a knife.
PEOPLE who don't return their electoral registration form can expect a knock at the door, says Redcar and Cleveland Council.
The victim answered a knock at the door and was confronted by a white male who pushed her out the way, entered her home and made off with her handbag.