A-Z Database
see Act the giddy goat
see Won on the playing fields of Eton
Punch, as in a Punch and Judy Show, is an abbreviation of Punchinello who was the prototype and principal character of a traditional Italian puppet sh...
Mainly British, Australian and New Zealand informal for cheap, average quality wine. The expression originated amongst Australian soldiers during WWI...
Eric Partridge has this as British slang for penis from c. 1917. During the 1970s, it acquired its less offensive meaning of a stupid, inept person an...
The plot thickens is a cliché that is used ironically or half-humorously to signify that a state of affairs is becoming more involved, complex or myst...
Its figurative meaning is to follow a course of action where one is isolated or acts independently and dates from the late 18th/early 19th century.
These variations have been common expressions since the 1400s. Pluck up is simply the Old English way of saying take up, gather up, or summon up. Shak...
It is very strange that pluck or to pluck, as both noun and verb, meaning to pull or tug, as in to pluck a chicken or pluck someone from the jaws of d...
Plum as in a plum job, meaning a post that rewards well while not requiring great effort, dates in this sense from the late 18th century and derives f...
American informal for absolutely or downright, as in ‘plumb crazy’, and dates in this sense from the mid-18th century and derives from the notion of a...
This familiar word for the artisan who fixes the piping etc in our homes has been around since The Middle Ages. Plumbum is the Latin for lead and the...
Po-faced means a humourless, disdainful or sour-faced demeanour and is British slang of unknown origin from the 1930s. The OED ventures that it might...
This was a phrase coined by literary critic and historian Thomas Rymer in Tragedies of the Last Age Considered in 1678. For Rymer, ‘poetical’ justice...
Sometimes known as creative licence where reality may be stretched for the sake of artistic expression, was first coined by Cicero (106-43 B.C.) poeta...