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Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, sometimes referred to simply as Brewer's, is a reference work containing definitions and explanations of many famous phrases, allusions, and figures, whether historical or mythical. The "New Edition revised, corrected, and enlarged" from 1895 is now in the public domain, and Web-based versions are ...
E. Cobham Brewer. Ebenezer Cobham Brewer (2 May 1810 in Norwich [1] – 6 March 1897 in Edwinstowe, Nottinghamshire), was a British lexicographer and the author of A Guide to the Scientific Knowledge of Things Familiar, Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, and The Reader's Handbook, among other reference books.
Brewer's Dictionary of Irish Phrase and Fable ( ISBN 0-304-36334-0) was created by Jo O'Donoghue and Sean McMahon for the Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable series of books. It contains over five thousand entries regarding various subjects about Ireland and its sayings, myths, legends and fables .
Francis Barlow's illustration of the fable, 1687. The Boy Who Cried Wolf is one of Aesop's Fables, numbered 210 in the Perry Index. [1] From it is derived the English idiom "to cry wolf", defined as "to give a false alarm" in Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable [2] and glossed by the Oxford English Dictionary as meaning to make false claims, with the result that subsequent true claims are ...
The expression originally referred to a method of treatment for a rabid dog bite by placing hair from the dog in the bite wound. [1] Ebenezer Cobham Brewer writes in the Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1898): "In Scotland it is a popular belief that a few hairs of the dog that bit you applied to the wound will prevent evil consequences.
This phrase may have originated in Middle English as a collocation of common names – similar to, for example, Tom, Dick, and Harry – with the religious connotations accruing later, [10] or alternatively as a reference to Saint Peter and Saint Paul (who are often depicted jointly in Christian art and regarded similarly in theology).
The lion's share is an idiomatic expression which now refers to the major share of something. The phrase derives from the plot of a number of fables ascribed to Aesop [1] and is used here as their generic title. There are two main types of story, which exist in several different versions. Other fables exist in the East that feature division of ...
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 ...