A-Z Database
Act independently without reliance on anyone else is an American expression and has been used in this figurative sense since the early 19th century an...
Everyone knows what a padlock is and its use in the language is first cited from the late 15th century but the ‘pad’ part remains a complete etymologi...
This is an old proverb meaning that bad intentions or actions against others often backfire and result in bad consequences for the initiator. This con...
Most of these expressions for an annoying, troublesome person date from the late 19th/early 20th century. Pain in the neck is the polite euphemism, wh...
see Corner
To go on wild spree is an American expression that dates from the late 19th century. Despite the claims of Melton Mowbray, a town in England, that the...
This has now come to mean a fuss or an unnecessary complication; a situation that has gone slightly out of control, usually accompanied with unproduct...
see Beyond the pale
Wan is a Middle English word (1150-1350) meaning pallid or sickly. Pale and wan is attributed to the poet Edmund Spenser (1552-1599) “As pale and wan...
First citation for this is American from 1794.
A dull, clumsy, stupid person, especially a boxer, an American expression allegedly coined by humourist and sports writer Jack Conway in 1925.
American informal expression meaning to see how things turn out, dates from the mid-18th century and derives from panning for gold.
Means uproar, complete confusion, but only acquired this meaning during the 18th century. The word itself was coined by John Milton in Paradise Lost i...
Opening Pandora’s Box is to cause great trouble and strife and the expression in English dates from the 1500s, although it was also known to the ancie...
Alarm or emergency device activated by means of a button, derives from the bell-warning devices on American B-17 and B-24 bombers during WWII, which s...