A-Z Database
Well-heeled is an American expression from the latter half of the 19th century for wealthy or rich and derives from the notion that wealthy people can...
Named after Sam Weller and his father, characters in Charles Dickens Pickwick Papers (1837) and has come to mean a style of speech or expression typic...
Wellies, an abbreviation of Wellington boots, has been around since the 19th century but during the 1970s, the word became popular as a verb, as in “I...
see Gone for a Burton
see See a man about a dog
To be a ‘wet’ is public school slang from the late 19th/early 20th century for a weak and ineffectual person. Eric Partridge maintains it is a more po...
Wet behind the ears is a metaphor for a novice or beginner and the evidence seems to suggest that this is an American expression from the early 20th c...
Since at least the late 1600s, wet blankets were used to extinguish fires. By the mid-19th century it had become figurative for a person who threw a d...
see Fart in a trance
Originally, from the early 1600s, a wet nurse was a woman employed to suckle the infant of another, the opposite of a dry nurse who looked after an in...
Whistle has been a jocular name for the mouth or throat since The Middle Ages. To wet one’s whistle is simply to have a drink of something. This expre...
A fair whack meaning a just portion or share is British slang and dates from the late 18th/early 19th century, presumably from having whacked or cut s...
American slang for male masturbation dates from the early 20th century. Most of the words connected with male masturbation have an association with sl...
In the sense of describing something unusually large or big, as in ‘a whacking great rump steak’, is British slang from the early 19th century. See al...
see Oh what a tangled web we weave