A-Z Database
“Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” Shakespeare’s famous lines on gre...
Greek fire was a combustible, incendiary weapon invented by the Greeks of the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire around 672 AD. Many ancient civilisati...
It’s all Greek to me means that something is as incomprehensible as Greek would be to someone who did not know the language. Shakespeare uses the expr...
Gills, of course, are the organs through which fish breathe, but from the early 1600s gills also described the flesh under the jaws and ears of humans...
The ability to grow things, British expression dates from c. 1930, presumably from the green-stained fingers of avid gardeners. The Americans say, gre...
Shakespeare was the first to form an association between jealousy and the colour green in The Merchant of Venice (1596) Act III, Scene II when he desc...
Despite its adoption in America to describe a young, inexperienced novice, this is an old English word dating from around 1460 when it was first used...
The grim reaper, sometimes capitalised as 'The Grim Reaper' is a metaphorical phrase for death. The visual representation of death, usually a skeletal...
This expression for a broad grin or excessive smile has been around in English since the late 18th century and was already well established when Lewis...
As in daily grind or a dull, laborious task, a metaphor from grinding or milling that dates from the mid-19th century.
In the literal sense, to produce a grating sound with the teeth dates from the early 15th century, whereas the figurative sense of showing determinati...
To grind a person’s gears is to annoy or irritate them, an American colloquialism that dates from the mid-20th century from the obvious allusion to gr...
Latin-American and Spanish slang for anyone of North American or British descent and dates from the mid-19th century. The story that it derives from t...
The complete saying is that something or other is grist for or to the mill. For example, if a person as a guest brings something for a host's barbecu...
‘Grit’ in the sense of firmness or solidity of character in showing pluck, determination and spirit is American from the early 19th century and possib...