A-Z Database
Contrary to popular wisdom, toff, which is British informal for an upper class, wealthy person does not derive from toffee nosed. In fact, it is the o...
Not to be able to do something for toffee, as ‘he can’t play tennis for toffee’ is a colloquialism (the OED says slang) for incompetence and dates fro...
Not to be able to do something 'for toffee', as in ‘he can’t play tennis for toffee’ is a British colloquialism (the OED says slang) for incompetence,...
see Toff
see By the same token
Tom, as in the male of species of animals and birds, as in a tom cat, dates from the late 18th century. Tom in South Africa is slang for money and der...
British rhyming slang for six, Tom Mix/six. Mostly used in the context of cricket where Tom Mix means a one-shot hit for six runs. Tom Mix (1880-1940)...
A native drum, dates from the late 17th century, and derives from the Hindi word for such a drum, tam tam, which the OED says is probably imitative of...
As in ‘every Tom, Dick and Harry was there’, which, despite the names, means that an unspecified number of unknown people were there. Putting together...
The etymology is from Tom, a common name for a boy, and from the mid-16th century was first used to describe a typically boisterous, rude or forward b...
Tomfoolery meaning silly or foolish behaviour dates from the early 19th century. Tom Fool as an expression for a fool has been known since the 14th ce...
British informal for the average British Army soldier; dates from the late 19th century and derives from Thomas Atkins, the example name used in army...
Shortening of Thompson sub-machine gun, dates from the early 1920s. The weapon was patented in 1920 by General John Thompson its American inventor.
Utter rubbish, nonsense or foolishness is a later development from tomfoolery and dates from the late 19th century.
Famously the last lines of Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone with the Wind (1936) and spoken by Vivien Leigh in the 1939 movie. As a popular maxim, it ha...