A - Z Database
Meaning spirit or courage is first attested from the late 19th century, while gutless meaning the opposite first appears c. 1915. To hate someone’s gu...
This expression is usually in the form of a very serious threat as in to have someone’s guts for garters. It is a particularly gruesome metaphor and o...
The literal meaning is eviscerated but it has become a vogue word since the 1980s for devastated or extremely disappointed, most frequently used by Br...
By some unknown quirk, this word has come to mean, in the UK, a dealer in sewing and dressmaking materials, while in the US it means a dealer in men’s...
There are several meanings for the word hack but in the sense of a hack writer or anyone hired to do routine work, it is an abbreviation of hackneyed....
see Make one’s hackles rise
see Hack
see Chips (had his or hers)
Refers to a little of the alcohol that one imbibed the day before the hangover, taken as a cure for the latter. Used in this figurative sense, it deri...
see Make one’s hair stand on end
see By/to/within a hair’s breadth
see Conniption
see Give the hairy eyeball
This phrase has been used to describe days of calm, blissful weather since the 16th century. Shakespeare used it in this way in 1591 in King Henry VI,...
Seems almost too obvious to be a proverb but an old proverb it was when it first appeared in English in John Heywood Proverbs (1546), “Better is half...