An expletive signifying fulness or completeness of action, like the occasional use of the word “full.”
1843. Nancy she’d stay alone a readin Scott’s Family Bible: so that she got three times right spang through it, from kiver to kiver—the whole three volumes, notes, practical observations, marginal references, and all!—B. R. Hall (‘Robert Carlton’), ‘The New Purchase,’ i. 173.
1848. Bimeby a sort of skimmilk-lookin feller cum and tuck a seat rite close by her, and looked her rite spang in the face.—W. T. Thompson, ‘Major Jones’s Sketches of Travel,’ p. 30 (Phila.).
1848. After findin my way down stairs I went in the barber’s room and got shaved, and I do blieve if it hadn’t been so early in the mornin, I should went spang to sleep while Billy was takin my beard off.—Id., p. 61.
1848. I done the very best dodgin I could, but every now and then I run spang agin sumbody.—Id., p. 70.
1848. The fust thing I know’d, I cum in an ace of jumpin spang off the steeple into the tree-tops below.—Id., p. 85.
1910. Pulque shops [in Mexico] seem created for the benefit of blind men of bibulous tendencies. They exude, even the best and cleanest of them, a sour odor which is penetrating and far-reaching. If one thirsts for pulque, let him follow his nose and it will bring him right spang up against the bar where peons stand guzzling the milky fluid at 2 centavos per large glass. All of the sweet savors of Araby combined could make slight headway against the reek of a pulque shop.—New York Evening Post, July 21.
