‘Miss’-‘Ms’: origin
‘miss’: unmarried woman or girl; 17th cent., short for ‘mistress’—‘Ms’: title free of reference to marital status; 20th cent., blend of ‘Mrs’ and ‘Miss’
Read MoreCategory: United Kingdom & Ireland
meaning and origin of ‘Mrs Grundy’
from Speed the Plough (1798), by Thomas Morton; Dame Ashfield is constantly fearing to give occasion for the sneers of Mrs Grundy, her unseen neighbour
Read More‘the proof of the pudding is in the eating’: meaning, origin and variants
‘something new can only be judged to be good or bad after it has been tried or used’ (‘proof’ = ‘test’)—1623, in Remaines, concerning Britaine, by W. Camden
Read Moremeaning and origin of the phrase ‘to see a man about a dog’
UK, 1865—vague excuse for leaving to keep an undisclosed appointment, or, now frequently, to go to the toilet—perhaps originally with allusion to dogfighting
Read Moreorigin of ‘to don’ and ‘to doff’
coalesced forms of the obsolete phrasal verbs ‘to do on’ and ‘to do off’, meaning respectively ‘to put on’ and ‘to take off’ (an item of clothing)
Read Morethe legendary origin of ‘a Roland for an Oliver’
meaning: ‘tit for tat’—Oliver was a full match for his comrade Roland, the legendary nephew of Charlemagne in ‘La Chanson de Roland’ and other romances
Read Moreorigin of the British phrase ‘—— rule(s) OK’
UK, 1971, in graffiti—preceded by a proper or common noun in the singular or plural; used to assert the pre-eminence of a specified person or thing
Read Moreorigin of ‘blanket’ and of phrases containing ‘blanket’
‘blanket’: from Old-Northern-French and Anglo-Norman forms such as ‘blankete’ (white woollen material), composed of ‘blanc’ (white) and the diminutive suffix ‘-ette’
Read Moremeaning and origin of ‘to be part and parcel of’
from the legal formula ‘part and parcel’, in which both nouns meant ‘an integral portion of something’, the second noun merely reinforcing the first
Read Moremeaning and origin of ‘on the spur of the moment’
UK, 1784—elaborated on the archaic ‘on the spur’, which meant ‘in great haste’ and referred to the use of spurs to urge a horse forward
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