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An idiom is a phrase or expression that largely or exclusively carries a figurative or non-literal meaning, rather than making any literal sense. Categorized as formulaic language , an idiomatic expression's meaning is different from the literal meanings of each word inside it. [ 1 ]
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).
Based on common linguistic definitions, an idiom is a combination of words that contains a meaning that cannot be understood based on the literal definition of the individual words. [1] An example of an idiom is hit the sack, which means to go to bed. It can be used in a sentence like the following: I'm beat; I'm gonna hit the sack. [2]
An idiom is an expression that has a figurative meaning often related, but different from the literal meaning of the phrase. Example: You should keep your eye out for him. A pun is an expression intended for a humorous or rhetorical effect by exploiting different meanings of words. Example: I wondered why the ball was getting bigger. Then it ...
The count sense of the word idiom, referring to a saying with a figurative meaning, is related to the present sense of the word by the arbitrariness and peculiarity aspects; the idiom "she is pulling my leg" (meaning "she is humorously misleading me") is idiomatic because it belongs, by convention, to the language, whether or not anyone can ...
When a word, phrase, image, or idea is repeated throughout a work or several works of literature. For example, in Ray Bradbury's short story, "There Will Come Soft Rains", he describes a futuristic "smart house" in a post-nuclear-war time.
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 ...
Various sentences using the syllables mā, má, mǎ, mà, and ma are often used to illustrate the importance of tones to foreign learners. One example: Chinese: 妈妈骑马马慢妈妈骂马; pinyin: māma qí mǎ, mǎ màn, māma mà mǎ; lit. 'Mother is riding a horse... the horse is slow... mother scolds the horse'. [37]