A - Z Database
This metaphor means to deceive or mislead someone and dates from the early 20th century. It is not known who coined it but it is thought to derive fro...
see Leading with the chin
The very latest, most up-to-date, the phrase dates from the 1970s. See also Cutting edge.
Leading light in the sense of moral or expert guidance dates from the 19th century, but its origin as illumination to lead the way in the dark is like...
A leading question is a question that guides the respondent to an answer pre-planned by the questioner and dates from the early 19th century.
Approaching an issue or situation naively and defencelessly, an Americanism that dates in the figurative sense from the 1950s but its earlier literal...
see Take a leaf from someone’s book
see Take or have a leak
Attributed by most to Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) the Danish theologian and philosopher who used the metaphor to describe the way in which religious...
So-called since the 1400s because anniversaries or fixed feast days after February in such a year, leap or jump by two days not one. If one’s birthday...
see Know/learn/show someone the ropes
Similar to least or less said the better, this is first attested in English in John Heywood Two Hundred Epigrams (1556), “little said soon amended”. S...
see Least/less said, soonest mended
see Left in the lurch
Leave no stone unturned is one of the many adages that the medieval scholar Erasmus translated from Greek and Roman sources. It means, of course, to m...