A-Z Database
An eponym meaning to expurgate or edit text or speech, removing material considered improper or offensive, with the connotation that the text or speec...
see Life is just a bowl of cherries
To be overwhelmed by surprise and this figurative sense derives from literally causing someone to fall head over heels i.e. causing them to be rolled...
The Bowler hat is so-called after John Bowler, hat manufacturer of Nelson Square, London, during the mid-19th century.
To feel like a box of birds is antipodean slang for feeling chirpy and happy; dates from the 1940s.
So called because this was where tickets were sold for theatre boxes, generally the most expensive type of theatre seats. The term dates from the mid-...
To be in the box seats is to be in a favourable or advantageous position and dates from the late 19th century, from the allusion to theatre boxes as t...
Refers to male-orientated leisure playthings like off-road scrambling bikes, speedboats etc dates from the 1980s and should not to be confused with to...
A boycott is an organised refusal to have relations of any kind with others on account of differences or disagreements in order to get them to abandon...
Modern rhyming slang for excrement, Brad Pitt/shit; dates from around 2000.
Presumed licence to boast about one’s accomplishments, especially after winning or achieving something, dates from c. 1977.
Drunk, intoxicated, rhyming slang, Brahms and Liszt/pissed, dates from the 1930s.
In America, where the expression originated, it is brain trust. In Britain and elsewhere in the English-speaking world, it is usually brains trust, in...
Originally. a brainstorm was a sudden impulse or mental disorder and this usage dates from the late 19th century. Half a century later, brainstorming...
The forcible indoctrination or persuasion through propaganda and salesmanship, the word is first recorded from c.1950. It is a literal translation of...