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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).
Idioms occur frequently in all languages; in English alone there are an estimated twenty-five thousand idiomatic expressions. [2] Some well known idioms in English are spill the beans (meaning "reveal secret information"), it's raining cats and dogs (meaning "it's raining intensely"), and break a leg (meaning "good luck").
The Cambridge Guide to English Usage by Pam Peters is a usage dictionary, giving an up-to-date account of the debatable issues of English usage and written style.It is based on extensive, up-to-date corpus data rather than on the author's personal intuition or prejudice, and differentiates among US, UK, Canadian and Australian usages.
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 ...
Glossary of English-language idioms derived from baseball; Bed of roses; Belling the Cat; Best friends forever; Between Scylla and Charybdis; Bill matter; Birds of a feather flock together; Black sheep; Blessing in disguise; Blood, toil, tears and sweat; Born in the purple; The Boy Who Cried Wolf; Bread and butter (superstition) Break a leg ...
Kuiper uses the fact that this idiom is a phrase that is a part of the English lexicon (technically, a "phrasal lexical item"), and that there are different ways that the expression can be presented—for instance, as the common "hail-fellow-well-met," which appears as a modifier before the noun it modifies, [6] [7] versus the more original ...
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Redirect page. Redirect to: English-language idioms
Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary 3rd Edition CD-ROM. The Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary (abbreviated CALD) is a British dictionary of the English language. It was first published in 1995 under the title Cambridge International Dictionary of English by the Cambridge University Press. The dictionary has over 140,000 words, phrases ...