A-Z Database
see Bad egg
This expression means to look foolish or embarrassed as a result of some gaffe or other, much as one would as a careless eater of eggs, with remnants...
This egg has nothing whatsoever to do with those laid by chickens and other birds. Egg meaning to encourage or to incite is a very old word indeed, de...
An intellectual or boffin an Americanism dates from the 1950s from the association of being highbrow or high-browed, which is also American from the l...
The complete saying is, do not put all your eggs in one basket and one suspects that the origin of the expression was an egg or poultry farmer who fou...
See As sure as eggs is/are eggs
Why is this part of the body called an 'elbow'? It derives from an old Anglo-Saxon word 'ell' meaning arm or forearm and 'bow' being the bow or bend...
This well-known expression for hard manual work dates from the early 17th century. The allusion is to the way the elbow is used in hard polishing, rub...
This catchphrase, supposedly from the Sherlock Holmes’ novels by Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle, does not actually appear in any of them! It only appeared in...
This expression originated in America during the mid-20th century and is a hyperbole that describes a patently obvious but socially embarrassing or aw...
At the eleventh hour has come to mean the last possible moment and in this sense it effectively means the same thing as the last minute. The eleventh...
"This has become an ubiquitous catchphrase that only began to take off in the early 1980s, some years after the singer's premature death in 1977, aged...
Foolish or witless people are the most noisy and talkative, an old English proverb that dates from the 1400s where the vessel concerned is a drinking...
see At the end of one’s rope/tether
see Egg on one’s face