A dictionary of Confusable Phrases: More Than 10,000 Idioms and Collocations

strike gold • strike it rich
strike gold —
1
. find gold: Andrew Prichard struck gold along
the North Fork of the Coeur d’Alene River in 
1
88
1
. 2. (Sport)
win a gold medal in a competition: India’s women’s hockey
team struck gold for the first time in the Commonwealth tour-
nament. 3. become rich or successful, especially suddenly or
unexpectedly: He struck gold when he took up the challenge
of building a palace for king Khalid.
strike it rich —
1
. discover oil or a large vein of minerals:
Heflin plays a loner who has finally struck it rich in the Nevada
desert. …to get his gold out he must trust an old enemy. 2.
= strike gold 3: Lila’s father struck it rich with some weird
investments which people thought would fail in two months.
strike the bull’s eye • strike the eye
strike the bull’s eye—(also: hit the bull’s-eye) 
1
. attain the
straight actor
– 308 –

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intended object; succeed: We have some potentially good evi-
dence, and we just haven’t been able to strike the bull’s eye
yet. 2. guess the right thing; make a correct conjecture: In the
test paper, as they compare notes, he seems to have almost
struck the bull’s eye in his answers.
strike the eye —(also: hit the eye) be very obvious or impres-
sive; make a strong impact: The external aspect of Palmyrene
culture strikes the eye with its complexity and peculiarity.
strip film • stripping film
strip film —a 35 mm film mounted vertically frame by frame
for sequential projection: A still further object is to provide a
multi-purpose machine, usable concurrently as a slide or strip
film projector, an overhead projector, an opaque projector…
stripping film —
1
. thin paper or film used to correct tones
in photographs: Strip Editor is a software to make corrections
of plate data. In conventional method, stripping film is used
to make corrections. 2. a photographic “plate” having a film
which may be separated from its support: In 
1
886 he intro-
duced stripping film, in which paper was used only to support
the emulsion and was stripped off once the negative had been
transferred to glass.