A-Z Database
Forget all the myths about the groom or sometimes the bride and groom drinking honeyed mead for the first month of their marriage to ensure fertility....
To vomit British slang dates from c. 1950 and is of echoic or imitative origin. Possibly by association, it also means to stink.
This American expression usually refers these days to a ragtime style of music, usually played on a piano, hence honky-tonk piano and this meaning dat...
Pejorative black American term for a white person dates from the early 1970s. The origin is unknown but one suggestion is that honking is the noise th...
British colloquial expression that means upon my honour used to affirm that what is being said is true dates, according to the OED, from 1819. It is r...
A fuss or commotion dates from the 1930s thought to derive from Yiddish hu-ha meaning the same thing.
American slang for liquor dates from the late 19th/early 20th century and is an abbreviation of Hoochinoo, an Alaskan tribe of Native Americans who ma...
Abbreviation of hoodlum is from c. 1930. Hood is also a shortened form of neighbourhood, which is African-American slang from the late 1980s.
Sometimes spelt hoody is short for hooded sweatshirt and can mean either the garment or the young, usually male, people who wear them. The word made i...
Originally this was American slang for a young rowdy street ruffian c. 1871 and by 1877 came to mean a young criminal gangster. The origin is unknown...
American alternative version of voodoo dates from the late 19th century but refers specifically to a person or thing that brings bad luck. See also, h...
Having heard this word so often in movies, especially Westerns, one would think its origin is American. It comes as a bit of a surprise for most peopl...
US slang for rubbish or nonsense dates from the 1920s of unknown origin.
see By hook or by crook
To swallow something hook, line and sinker is to take the bait as it were and completely believe an unlikely story. It is an American expression from...