A-Z Database
This is a vacation where one engages in activities that are similar to one’s usual work. The expression dates from the early 20th century and derives...
To bust a gut is a metaphor that means to try very hard at something, from the allusion of straining every ounce of one’s being, including one’s guts....
Chops meaning one’s jaw was Standard English in the early 1500s and then became low informal by the mid-17th century. To bust someone’s chops is Ameri...
A solecism or corruption of burst as both noun and verb that first makes its appearance in English from around 1830. Charles Dickens uses it in severa...
Buster is a chap, a bloke or fellow and is pejorative North American slang that dates from the late 19th century. It derives from the now obsolete, bu...
Today’s meaning and usage is usually descriptive of a Lesbian or woman who is overly masculine. This usage is originally American from c.1940 and has...
To take a butcher’s at something is to look at something. It derives from rhyming slang, butcher’s hook/look, from the early 20th century.
Butt, as in to head butt or hit with the head or horns, dates from the 1200s. Butt, as in a barrel or cask, dates from the 1300s. Butt, as in the shor...
To interrupt, intrude or meddle is originally American and dates from the late-19th century from the allusion to a bull or steer using its horns aggre...
An Americanism dates from the early 20th century c. 1906 that is simply the opposite of butt in and is generally used as a retort to someone who has j...
The complete proverb is fine words butter no parsnips which means that words by themselves, no matter how fine, can never complete the task or solve t...
This expression for pure innocence first appears in John Heywood Proverbs (1546) “She looketh as butter would not melt in her mouth.”
Butterfingers or to be butter-fingered is a person who drops things as if having butter on the fingers or hands thus making them slippery, dates from...
This expression describes that fluttery feeling in the pit of one’s stomach that we have all experienced at one time or another when nervous. It dates...
Slang for clitoris from about 1870. Also pugilistic slang for the chin from the early 1900s. See On the button.