A-Z Database
see Have your cake and eat it
‘You never had it so good’ was the slogan of the 1952 US Democrat election campaign. ‘The people of Britain have never had it so good’ was also the sl...
This British catchphrase, which means that one gets what one pays for was coined by Punch magazine in 1846.
see Buck up
The last letter of the alphabet, pronounced ‘zed’ in Britain and Commonwealth Countries but ‘zee’ in America, is also slang for sleep when pluralised...
Zany is a word that has come to mean clownish in an offbeat sort of way. It is a lot older than most realise, dating back to the 16th century, and der...
Zap is an echoic comic strip sound-effect word of American origin that dates from the 1930s, especially featured in Buck Rogers comics. Zap, meaning t...
see Z/Z's
see Z/Z's
A hydrogen-filled German airship, dating from around 1900, named after the German general who perfected it, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin (1838-1917)....
US slang expression that means nothing or zero. Like zip or zippo, its etymology is unknown, but some say it dates from the 1930s with the appearance...
Obviously a play on the word million and denotes a very large but indefinite number. It was coined by Damon Runyon in 1944.
The US postal service introduced an address code system called ZIP codes in 1963. ZIP is an acronym for Zone Improvement System.
A figurative expression meaning to close or shut one’s mouth in much the same way one would close a zip fastener. It is thought to be of American orig...
Zip as in to move quickly or zip by is purely echoic and dates from the mid-19th century and is American in origin. Zip has also come to mean nil or z...