A - Z Database
Trying to find a needle in a haystack describes a well-nigh impossible task and first appears in this form during the 1700s. Before this, during the 1...
To annoy or irritate someone; this figurative use derives from the allusion of literally goading or pricking someone with a sharp needle, hence ‘give...
This maxim is not a proverb and was in fact coined by Shakespeare in Hamlet (1601) Act I, Scene III. The full quotation is, “Neither a borrower nor a...
These days, neither fish nor fowl means neither one thing nor the other and dates in this form only from the early 19th century. When it first appeare...
Usually in the form of ‘I have seen neither hide nor hair of that person for some time now’ which means there has not been the faintest trace of such...
Rhyming slang for Stella Artois a brand of Belgian beer, Nelson Mandela/Stella, dates from the early 1990s.
Unlike the expression, rack one’s brain, where wrack would be incorrect, when it comes to nerves, both ‘rack’ and ‘wrack’ are correct. Nerve-racking m...
Nest egg as in savings or investments set aside for later use derives from the notion of placing a false egg in a chicken’s nest to induce and encoura...
see Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight
This is a very old saying that urges one to never harm or endanger one's own interests, from the obvious analogy of a bird besmirching its own nest, a...
see Gift horse
To buy something on the never-never is a British colloquialism for hire purchase, with the implication that one never stops paying, dates from the ear...
The fictitious home place of Peter Pan from J. M. Barrie’s popular play Peter Pan (1904) and hence a synonym for a sense of dreamy unreality. Perhaps...
A never-say-die attitude is one that never accepts defeat and dates from the early 1800s.
This oxymoron is wrongly attributed to Charles Dickens' Pickwick Papers (1837) in which it does not appear. The origin, however, is obscure, but a Go...