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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).
Eating crow is a colloquial idiom, [1] used in some English-speaking countries, that means humiliation by admitting having been proven wrong after taking a strong position. [2] The crow is a carrion-eater that is presumably repulsive to eat in the same way that being proven wrong might be emotionally hard to swallow. [2]
Circle the wagons. Circle the wagons is an English language idiom which may refer to a group of people who unite for a common purpose. Historically the term was used to describe a defensive maneuver which was employed by Americans in the 19th century. The term has evolved colloquially to mean people defending each other.
American Indian English or Native American English is a diverse collection of English dialects spoken by many American Indians and Alaska Natives, [3] notwithstanding indigenous languages also spoken in the United States, of which only a few are in daily use. For the sake of comparison, this article focuses on similarities across varieties of ...
Back-seat driver. Barking up the wrong tree. 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.
This is a list of idioms that were recognizable to literate people in the late-19th century, and have become unfamiliar since. As the article list of idioms in the English language notes, a list of idioms can be useful, since the meaning of an idiom cannot be deduced by knowing the meaning of its constituent words. See that article for a fuller ...
Comprehension of Idioms. Comprehension of idioms is the act of processing and understanding idioms. Idioms are a common type of figure of speech. 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 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 ...