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An idiom is a common word or phrase with a figurative, non-literal meaning that is understood culturally and differs from what its composite words' denotations would suggest; i.e. the words together have a meaning that is different from the dictionary definitions of the individual words (although some idioms do retain their literal meanings – see the example "kick the bucket" below).
An idiom dictionary may be a traditional book or expressed in another medium such as a database within software for machine translation.Examples of the genre include Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, which explains traditional allusions and proverbs, and Fowler's Modern English Usage, which was conceived as an idiom dictionary following the completion of the Concise Oxford English ...
A jobsworth is a person who uses the (typically small) authority of their job in a deliberately uncooperative way, or who seemingly delights in acting in an obstructive or unhelpful manner. It characterises one who upholds petty rules even at the expense of effectiveness or efficiency .
A proverbial phrase or expression is a type of conventional saying similar to a proverb and transmitted by oral tradition. The difference is that a proverb is a fixed expression, while a proverbial phrase permits alterations to fit the grammar of the context. [1] [2] In 1768, John Ray defined a proverbial phrase as:
A synonym is a word, morpheme, or phrase that means precisely or nearly the same as another word, morpheme, or phrase in a given language. [2] For example, in the English language, the words begin, start, commence, and initiate are all synonyms of one another: they are synonymous. The standard test for synonymy is substitution: one form can be ...
It is a sister site to The Free Dictionary and usage examples in the form of "references in classic literature" taken from the site's collection are used on The Free Dictionary 's definition pages. In addition, double-clicking on a word in the site's collection of reference materials brings up the word's definition on The Free Dictionary.
The Dictionary of Occupational Titles or D-O-T (DOT) refers to a publication produced by the United States Department of Labor which helped employers, government officials, and workforce development professionals to define over 13,000 different types of work, from 1938 to the late 1990s. The DOT was created by job analysts who visited thousands ...
A thesaurus (pl.: thesauri or thesauruses), sometimes called a synonym dictionary or dictionary of synonyms, is a reference work which arranges words by their meanings (or in simpler terms, a book where one can find different words with similar meanings to other words), [1] [2] sometimes as a hierarchy of broader and narrower terms, sometimes simply as lists of synonyms and antonyms.