meaning and origin of ‘Paul Pry’
UK, 1826—from the eponymous character played by John Liston in a comedy by John Poole, which premiered at the Haymarket Theatre, London, on 13th September 1825
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meaning and origin of ‘nosey parker’
UK, late 19th century—apparently with reference to a probably fictitious individual named Parker, taken as the type of someone inquisitive
Read Moremeaning and origin of ‘a little bird told me’
1711 in a letter by Jonathan Swift—perhaps from Ecclesiastes, 10:20: “a bird of the air shall carry the voice; and that which hath wings, shall tell the matter”
Read Moremilitary origin of ‘to save the day’
originated in the context of military engagements: ‘day’ denotes ‘a day of contest on the battlefield’ and the phrase means ‘to avert defeat in battle’
Read Moremeaning and origin of ‘spick and span’
mid-17th cent. in the sense ‘brand new’—from ‘spick and span new’, extension of ‘span new’, from Old Norse ‘spán-nýr’, ‘as new as a freshly cut wooden chip’
Read Moremeaning and origin of ‘shipshape and Bristol fashion’
UK, early 19th cent.—‘shipshape’: arranged properly as things on board ship should be; ‘Bristol fashion’: Bristol was then the major west-coast port of Britain
Read Moremeaning and origin of ‘to take the (King’s/Queen’s) shilling’
UK, 1707—‘to take the (King’s/Queen’s) shilling’: to sign up as a soldier, from the former practice of giving a shilling to a recruit when he enlisted
Read Moreorigin of the word ‘point-blank’
1571—probably from obsolete French ‘de pointe en blanc’, used of firing into empty space for the purpose of seeing how far a piece of artillery would carry
Read Moremeaning and origin of ‘all Lombard Street to a China orange’
UK (early form: 1763): a fanciful bet wagering the wealth that is available in Lombard Street—a centre of London banking—against something of trifling value
Read More‘the man on the Clapham omnibus’ – ‘the Clapham Sect’
UK—1903: ‘the man on the Clapham omnibus’, the average or typical person—1844: ‘the Clapham Sect’, a group of social reformers based at Clapham, London
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word histories 