A-Z Database
Rhyming slang for Stella Artois a brand of Belgian beer, Nelson Mandela/Stella, dates from the early 1990s.
Unlike the expression, rack one’s brain, where wrack would be incorrect, when it comes to nerves, both ‘rack’ and ‘wrack’ are correct. Nerve-racking m...
Currently, a British dialectical/colloquial expression that means 'not liking the cold' and is mainly used in the Midlands and north of England. The w...
Nest egg as in savings or investments set aside for later use derives from the notion of placing a false egg in a chicken’s nest to induce and encoura...
see Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight
This is a very old saying that urges one to never harm or endanger one's own interests, from the obvious analogy of a bird besmirching its own nest, a...
see Gift horse
A never-say-die attitude is one that never accepts defeat and dates from the early 1800s.
This oxymoron is wrongly attributed to Charles Dickens' Pickwick Papers (1837) in which it does not appear. The origin, however, is obscure, but a Go...
A vulgar saying that urges one never to harm or endanger one's own interests, and dates from the late 19th century. It's a more modern but less tastef...
Describes a situation where things are so far apart that unity or agreement is impossible, attributed to Rudyard Kipling The Ballad of East and West (...
To buy something on the never-never is a British colloquialism for hire purchase, with the implication that one never stops paying, dates from the ear...
The fictitious home place of Peter Pan from J. M. Barrie’s popular play Peter Pan (1904) and hence a synonym for a sense of dreamy unreality. Perhaps...
New overseers or managers make drastic or comprehensive changes. This was already an old proverb when it appeared in John Heywood Proverbs in 1546. Se...
A moment or perhaps a few seconds at most, this American expression dates from the 1950s based on the allusion to the fast, hurried lifestyle of peopl...