This Dictionary is part of the Oxford Reference Collection: using sustainable print-on-demand technology to make the acclaimed backlist of the Oxford Reference

What is a ham-and-egger?What are Anglo-Saxon attitudes?Who or what is liable to jump the shark?Who first tried to nail jelly to the wall? The answers to these a

This work explains the origins of the familiar and the unfamiliar in everyday speech and literature, including the colloquial and the proverbial. It embraces ar

Compiles over 10,000 quotations, proverbs, and phrases on over 350 themes, among them actors and acting, bores and boredom, elections, food and drink, kissing,