like greased lightning

grease | American Dictionary

grease
noun[ U ]
us/ɡris/
animal fat that is soft after melting:
There’s always a lot of grease when you cook lamb.
Grease is also any thick, oily substance:
You ought to put some grease on that hinge.

grease

verb[ T ]us/ɡris, ɡriz/
Grease the pan.

grease | Business English

grease
verb[ T ]
uk /ɡriːs/us
informal
to make something happen more easily:
Social connections can help grease the way to business deals.
The company's charitable donations helped grease its entry into the world of government contracts.
 grease sb's palmdisapproving
to give someone money secretly so that they will make things happen in the way that you want:
They managed to pull off the deal without greasing any palms.
They were expecting their palms to be greased with bribes.
 grease the wheels informal(US alsogrease the skids)
to make something happen more easily:
More investment is needed to grease the wheels of reform.

Examples of grease

grease
In 1570-1, however, the human subterfuge was replaced by 'a wider, more stereotypical malicious use of poisonous grease by witches ' (p. 149).
The heat and the aridity secured 'a hard, dry and frizzy wool, almost devoid of natural greases'.
The above-ground part of the cylinder was coated with grease to prevent ant access.
If there were such things as essentially invisible people, smearing their faces with opaque grease paint would render them visible.
Leakage between the nozzle and water table was prevented by the use of grease and weights.
The joint between the sections was 36.8 cm above the midsection and was sealed with silicon grease.
This suggests that the fuel depot contains more varied materials such as lubricating engine oil and also possibly grease.
After all, without greasing the official's hand, the litigant would have risked waiting forever to plead his case, still more winning it.
The sample chamber was attached to the specimen holder with thermoconductive silicon grease at the edges.
The nitrocellulose paper with attached retinal slices were transferred to a recording chamber, and fixed to the bottom with silicon vacuum grease.
They were drenched in grease, in tatters, wore male clothes, frightful faces, shameless.
The squeaky wheel gets the grease. 13.
Following air drying, acetate spacers (average dimensions, 0.12 x 3 x 75 mm) were adhered along the long edge of the glass slide using silicone grease.
Although the extroverted left hemisphere enjoys a good story and pontificates obsessively to grease the social wheels, might other brain areas be more adept at provoking self-consciously motivated actions?
A coverslip with four posts of silicone grease containing 20-50 m glass beads was placed on the slide and gently lowered until it contacted and slightly compressed the drop.
See all examples of grease
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.