have one's wits about one

Meaning: (idiomatic)To remaincalm,composed,focused, oraware.1869,Anthony Trollope, chapter 3, inPhineas Finn:He was confused, half elated, half disappointed, andhad not his wits about him.1889,Horatio Alger, chapter 10, inLuke Walton:Luke alone seemed tohave his wits about him. He saw that there was not a moment to lose, and, gathering up his strength, dashed to the old lady's assistance.1908,Upton Sinclair, chapter 10, inThe Moneychangers:And if you think he won'thave his wits about him, just you try to fool him on some deal, and see.1917,Knut Hamsun,Growth of the Soil, Book 1,Ch.3, at p.27:And so this woman from across the hills, a soft-spoken creaturewith her wits about her, and by name Oline, she stayed with them a couple of days, and had the little room to sleep in.

Examples:

No examples available.

Note: the examples for non latin scripts have a high likelihood of mistakes, we do not own any of this data and it is sourced from Wiktionary, the NLLB database and Opensubtitles. Please help us improve this by contributing correct examples. We will be working to fix this issue over time however it is a bigger issue due to the the difficulties in dealing with non latin scripts and grammatical structures(non-romantic/european languages have lower resources as well ).