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Pleonasm ( / ˈpliː.əˌnæzəm /; from Ancient Greek πλεονασμός (pleonasmós), from πλέον (pléon) 'to be in excess') [1] [2] is redundancy in linguistic expression, such as "black darkness," "burning fire," "the man he said," [3] or "vibrating with motion." It is a manifestation of tautology by traditional rhetorical criteria ...
In games where a ball may be legally caught (e.g. baseball) or carried (e.g. American football), a player (or the player's team) may be penalized for dropping the ball; for example, an American football player who drops a ball ("fumbles") risks having the ball recovered and carried by the other team; in baseball, a player who drops a thrown or ...
Its most common use is in response to an affirmative statement, for example "I saw Mrs. Smith exercising, I swear!" to which the response given would be something like, "Yeah right, and cows fly". Other variations slightly fallen into disuse include cuando las ranas crien pelo ("when frogs grow hair") and cuando San Juan agache el dedo ("when ...
In linguistics, phraseology is the study of set or fixed expressions, such as idioms, phrasal verbs, and other types of multi-word lexical units (often collectively referred to as phrasemes), in which the component parts of the expression take on a meaning more specific than, or otherwise not predictable from, the sum of their meanings when used independently.
Medical phrase serving as a synonym for death ad multos annos: to many years: Wish for a long life; similar to "many happy returns". ad nauseam: to sickness: i.e., "to the point of disgust". Sometimes used as a humorous alternative to ad infinitum.
Glossary of English-language idioms derived from baseball. This is an alphabetical list of common English-language idioms based on baseball, excluding the extended metaphor referring to sex, and including illustrative examples for each entry. Particularly American English has been enriched by expressions derived from the game of baseball.
Polysemy ( / pəˈlɪsɪmi / or / ˈpɒlɪˌsiːmi /; [1] [2] from Ancient Greek πολύ- (polý-) 'many', and σῆμα (sêma) 'sign') is the capacity for a sign (e.g. a symbol, a morpheme, a word, or a phrase) to have multiple related meanings. For example, a word can have several word senses. [3] Polysemy is distinct from monosemy, where a ...
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), sometimes as a hierarchy of broader and narrower terms, sometimes simply as lists of synonyms and antonyms.