A-Z Database
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, shit meaning unspecified objects, materials, activities, events, stuff, things, etc. as opposed to faeces,...
see Get someone’s goat
see Do-able
see Aghast
An imitative word meaning unintelligible speech or inarticulate chatter that dates from the 16th century. It has the suffix -ish to make it sound like...
see Act the giddy goat
Variously spelt giddyup, giddyap or giddap, it is a command to make a horse go faster, representing an altered pronunciation of ‘get up’. Giddy-up is...
The English proverb is never look gift horses in the mouth or sometimes expressed as don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. It means accept a gift grac...
A talent for speaking, a way with words, dates from the late 17th century. Gab is an Old English word for vaunt or mock and by the late 17th century w...
To gild the lily means to over-embellish or to improve on something needlessly. The concept if not the actual wording is from Shakespeare King John Ac...
Life in a gilded cage is a life of luxury but without freedom. The original gilded cage was coined by Arthur Lamb (1870-1924) in his poem A Bird in a...
A gadget, trick or device usually of a passing or worthless nature is originally American slang from the 1920s and its origin is unknown.
Rhyming slang for a homosexual, ginger beer/queer; dates from the 1930s.
To ginger up a person is to infuse mettle or spirit into them and dates from the early 19th century. It derives from the rather unpleasant practice of...
This word meaning cautiously or timidly has nothing to do with ginger up, the spice ginger or the colour ginger as in ginger-haired. The word is deriv...