A-Z Database
Since the First World War, a booby trap has come to mean a lethal explosive device triggered by touching or moving a seemingly harmless object. Before...
Boodle is originally American colloquial for a large quantity, especially money with the connotation of graft or illegal money. It dates from the earl...
This is American slang from the early 20th century for an isolated, remote region, the sticks or the middle of nowhere. It was a word originally picke...
see Re-boot
It is obliquely related to the boot one wears on the feet because from the early 1600s it referred to part of a horse-drawn coach, a sort of running b...
A maker or distributor of illicit alcohol, an American expression dates from the late 19th century, so-called because flasks of alcohol were once smug...
Plunder or spoils of war, but why is it called booty? Simply because it derives from Old Norse byta meaning to deal out, exchange or share, which of c...
‘Booze’, which is slang for alcoholic liquor or to drink heavily is first cited in Middle English during the 14th century, but the spelling was ‘bouse...
Boracic lint is a surgical dressing saturated in a solution of boracic acid and glycerine that has been in use since the 19th century it is also rhymi...
see Shitless
see Greatness
This expression is a catchphrase that is usually shouted to people who leave doors open, usually the form of a question, “Were you born in a barn?” Th...
To be born into affluence or under lucky auspices. The earliest appearance in print is in Cervantes’ Don Quixote, which was completed in 1615 and tran...
The juvenile correctional institutions in the UK were named after the village of Borstal, near Rochester in Kent, where the first institution was open...
A close, intimate friend from the allusion of clasping him or her to one’s breast or bosom and, by implication, close to one’s heart; dates from the l...