A-Z Database
see Know from a bar of soap
A person who knows how many beans make five is British colloquial speak for a person who has their wits about them or who knows their stuff, and dates...
One would imagine that we really know the back of our own hands very well, considering that our hands are in front of us all the time. Thus, the meani...
Know where one’s advantage lays, an old proverb that first appears in John Heywood Proverbs (1546).
Somewhat surprisingly, the origin of this expression, which means to know one’s stuff, is American from the 1920s. At the time, there was a whole host...
see Know how many beans make five
see Know one's onions
In all the variations of this expression, the ropes are the basic techniques that a sailor must learn about ropes and knots that were critical to seam...
To know what's what means to have a good general understanding or knowledge and is first attested from Charles Dickens Pickwick Papers (1837), “She kn...
This is Oscar Wilde’s famous definition of a cynic in Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) Act III. The full quotation is, “What is a cynic? A man who knows t...
Meaning to apply oneself studiously and conscientiously to the task at hand and dates in this sense from the early 19th century. It derives from the g...
A knuckle sandwich is a US colloquialism for a punch in the mouth from a clenched fist, as one would eat a sandwich. The expression dates from the ear...
Meaning to concede or admit defeat, from the act of kneeling with the knuckles on the ground, whether forced or voluntary, as a sign of surrender, dat...
A metal instrument that protects the knuckles while adding force to a blow struck with a closed fist. It was originally US criminal slang, dating from...
A knucklehead is a dull, stupid person; an Americanism that dates from the 1930s, from the allusion that stupid people press their knuckles to their f...