A-Z Database
Very or excessively high, can be used in different contexts e.g. prices, inflation or literally in term of altitude. Dates from the late 18th/early 19...
The sky is the limit means of course that there is no apparent limit. The expression is American from the late 19th/early 20th century.
Skyrocket is originally rhyming slang for pocket, skyrocket/pocket, dating from the mid-20th century. These days, the expression is very popular in th...
British slang to denigrate or rubbish a person dates from the 1970s and probably derives from slag meaning a disreputable person, which is dialectical...
A slam-dunk, first cited from the 1970s, is the forceful slamming of a basketball down into the net, an American sporting expression that has since de...
Vocabulary, expressions, words etc that are generally considered to be below the level of accepted or educated language. The word ‘slang’ dates from t...
British humorous informal for petting and kissing but can mean sexual intercourse depending on the context, first attested from c. 1910 according to P...
This expression is generally reserved these days to describe a large, hearty meal, which was also known in the early 19th century as a slap-bang meal...
British slang for urinate dates from the 1930s and is thought to be purely echoic.
Originally slang but now has colloquial status, to slate is to criticise or reprimand severely and dates from the 1840s. The origin is obscure but it...
see Take a sledgehammer to crack a nut
Verbal banter used in team sports to unsettle and distract opponents, the word dates from the 1960s and is thought to have originated in Australian cr...
To sleep soundly. This very old simile was most probably inspired by the immobility of a log of wood and dates from the 1600s. Some sources maintain i...
To sleep like a top means to sleep soundly and is an odd expression because children’s tops or spinning toys are hardly so stationary as to seem an ap...
see Wink of sleep