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Cartoon by James Gillray satirizing Sir Francis Buller, 1782: "Judge Thumb; or, Patent Sticks for Family Correction: Warranted Lawful!". A modern folk etymology [14] relates the phrase to domestic violence via an alleged rule under English common law which permitted wife-beating provided that the implement used was a rod or stick no thicker than a man's thumb. [6]
An 1857 version of the idiom is "It would freeze the tail off a brass monkey", and probably refers to a common type of tourist souvenir. [42] Rule of thumb is not derived from a medieval constraint on the thickness of an object with which one might beat one's wife. [43] [44] More likely it means that the thumb can be used to measure an ...
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).
Print/export Download as PDF; Printable version; In other projects ... Pages in category "Rules of thumb" The following 63 pages are in this category, out of 63 total
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 ...
Below is an alphabetical list of widely used and repeated proverbial phrases. If known, their origins are noted. A proverbial phrase or expression is a type of conventional saying similar to a proverb and transmitted by oral tradition.
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Sea change (idiom) Shut up; Silver bullet; Silver lining (idiom) Silver spoon; Sin City (description) Sitting on the fence; Skeleton in the closet; Skin of my teeth; Sliced bread; Small matter of programming; Smoke and mirrors; Speak of the devil; Spitting distance; List of sports idioms; Square peg in a round hole; Stalking horse; Stiff upper ...