A - Z Database
This expression meaning so little difference as to be the same thing dates from the early 19th century. It appears in several different formats e.g. s...
To be at sixes and sevens means to be in a state of disorder or confusion and the expression has been around in its singular form ‘six and seven’ sinc...
This has come to mean the crucial or ultimate question that needs to be addressed in any quest or endeavour. It is usually written in number form 64,0...
see Cheapskate, and also Get one's skates on
Whether to skate, tread, or walk on thin ice is very risky and can put one in a perilous situation. The expression is attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerso...
To skedaddle is to depart the scene in a great hurry and first appears in America at the time of the Civil War (1861-65) when troops on either side wo...
The figurative use of skeleton meaning a basic, structural outline, stripped down to its bare essentials, dates from the early 17th century, from the...
A skeleton crew is the minimum number of sailors required to sail a ship and dates from the late 18th/early 19th century, so-called because such a cre...
A skeleton key is so-called because its shape was filed down to its basic, essential parts, resembling a skeletal structure, designed to bypass the in...
To have a skeleton in the cupboard is have a potentially ruinous, secret source of shame or scandal. The expression dates back to the early 19th centu...
British colloquialism for askew or out of kilter and dates from the mid-19th century. The first part of the word is clearly from askew meaning awry o...
Skid row is an American expression that can mean either destitute or impoverished or it can mean a specific impoverished district of a town or city, r...
Rhyming slang for sister, skin and blister/sister, dates from the late 19th/early 20th century.
see By the skin of one’s teeth
A miserly, avaricious person dates from c. 1700 and derives from an earlier and now largely obsolete expression, to skin a flint, which meant miserly...