A - Z Database
In sporting contexts, a dink is a drop shot in tennis and other racquet games and this usage dates from the 1930s. More recently, it is frequently use...
This word, which today is principally Australian, first turns up in print in Australia in Robbery Under Arms (1888) by Ralph Boldrewood, “It took us a...
The OED gives dink as an adjective of Scottish dialectical origin meaning decked out or dressed finely and this usage dates from the early 1500s. By t...
see By dint of
A metaphor that means to try something new or start a new project cautiously without over-commitment or too much risk. It dates from about the 1950s,...
British slang from the early 20th century for a man to have sex, derives from rhyming slang Hampton Wick/prick.
Extremely poor with minimal income and assets, an American expression that dates from the 1930s, from the obvious allusion that poor people usually li...
Dirty laundry or linen, sometimes in the form of washing or airing one’s dirty laundry or linen in public, is a metaphor for personal secrets or scand...
see Into thin air
The etymological root of this word is from astrology; dis + aster, from the Latin dis signifying a negative and astrum, a star. Thus, a disaster was o...
This American expression for announcers/broadcasters of radio music is thought to have first appeared in print in Variety magazine in 1941. Other sour...
This comes from Shakespeare Henry IV Part I, Act V, Scene IV, “The better part of valour is discretion.”
Any offering, food etc, of exceptional quality, was coined by Shakespeare in Julius Caesar (1599). It was spoken by Brutus describing how the conspira...
Dixie or Dixieland is an American expression, which means the Southern states of America, particularly those who fought for the Confederacy in the US...
As a verb, do in the sense of copulate dates from the early 1600s whereas do in the sense of swindle dates from a little later during the mid-1600s. T...