靴子落地 — Chinese idiom

Meaning

• (lit.) the boot hits the floor
• (fig.) a much-anticipated, impactful development has finally occurred (an allusion to a joke from the 1950s in which a young man would take off a boot and throw it onto the floor, waking the old man sleeping downstairs who could then not get back to sleep until he had heard the second boot hit the floor)

Character by character

• 靴xuēboots
• 子zison, child; seed, egg; fruit; small thing
• 落luòto fall, to drop; surplus, net income
• 地dìearth, ground, soil; land, region; structural part

Idioms sharing a character

• 隔靴搔痒 gé xuē sāo yǎng
• 乱臣贼子 luàn chén zéi zǐ
• 仁人君子 rén rén jūn zǐ
• 佳人才子 jiā rén cái zǐ
• 多子多福 duō zǐ duō fú
• 妻离子散 qī lí zǐ sàn
• 子丑寅卯 zǐ chǒu yín mǎo
• 子子孙孙 zǐ zǐ sūn sūn
• 子承父业 zǐ chéng fù yè
• 子虚乌有 zǐ xū wū yǒu

Data: CC-CEDICT (CC BY-SA 4.0); Unihan Database (Unicode License v3). Retrieved 2026-10-22.