A book about the English language - or about any individual language is a daring.enterprise, for it has as many perceptive cities as there are fluent readers. The language as a whole belongs to no one, yet everyone owns a part of it, has an interest in it, and has an opinion about it…

Susan Ellis Wild has been a practicing lawyer since 1982, and currently is a fulltime litigator in Allentown, Pennsylvania. She is President of the 600+ member Bar Association of Lehigh County, Pennsylvania. Susan has litigated more than 100 cases and frequently writes and speaks to audiences about law-related topics. She has been appointed by courts on numerous occasions to act as an independent arbitrator/mediator of cases. Susan is admitted to the Bars of Pennsylvania, the District of Columbia, and Maryland, and has appeared in courts in a number of other states.

This volume has been derived from the magisterial work of Eric Partridge and his collaborator and successor Paul Beale. Most of the entries have been adapted from material in the second edition (1985) of the classic A Dictionary of Catch Phrases, although articles have also been specially written for items that came into currency in the 1990s.

The focus throughout is on expressions that are in current daily use, and familiar throughout most parts of the English-speaking world. Items originating in Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand are all to be found within these covers. We at Routledge are proud to publish this companion volume to the Shorter Dictionary of Slang (1993) as a tribute to Eric Partridge on the occasion of the centenary of his birth on 6 February 1894.

This volume consists of approximately 3,000 headword entries drawn in large part from our New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, in which we recorded slang and unconventional English heard anywhere in the English-speaking world any time since 1945. In that work and here we included pidgin, Creolized English and borrowed foreign terms used by English speakers in primarily English-language conversation. We excluded no term on the ground that it might be considered offensive as a racial, ethnic, religious, sexual or other slur. This dictionary contains many entries and citations that will, and should, offend.

All languages have phrases or sentences that cannot be understood literally. Even if you know the meaning of all the words in a phrase and understand all the grammar of the phrase completely, the meaning of the phrase may still be confusing. Many proverbs, informal phrases, and common sayings offer this kind of problem. A phrase or sentence of this type is said to be idiomatic. This dictionary is a collection of the idiomatic phrases and sentences that occur frequently in American English.

The language used in law is changing. There are many legal phrases that non-lawyers don’t understand. This guide is intended to help non-lawyers understand legal phrases and to give lawyers guidance in explaining the legal phrases they use. Although it comprises over 60 pages with over 1,400 words explained, this is not a complete dictionary of legal terms in use in Ireland.

The explanations in this guide are not intended to be alternatives. Lawyers will continue to use legal phrases when necessary. This publication is designed to explain ideas and concepts rather than to give legal definitions.

The aim of the Oxford Dictionary of Idioms is to provide clear definitions of phrases and sayings for those who do not know what they mean, but also to offer the curious reader interesting facts about the origins of phrases and examples of their use. This second edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Idioms is based on the first edition, edited by Jennifer Speake. It maintains the first edition's focus on contemporary and historical phrases, sayings, and proverbs, and uses a combination of definition and (where required) explanatory note and illustrative quotation to provide a rounded picture of idiomatic usage.

In its narrowest sense, a synonym is a word or phrase that is perfectly substitutable in a context for another word or phrase. People who study language professionally agree that there is no such thing as an ideal synonym, for it is virtually impossible to find two words or phrases that are identical in denotation (meaning), connotation, frequency, familiarity, and appropriateness. Indeed, linguists have long noted the economy of language, which suggests that no language permits a perfect fit, in all respects, between any two words or phrases.

AN etymological dictionary supplies neither pronunciations nor definitions. Here, pronunciation is indicated only where it affects the origin or the development of a word; and definitions only where, in little-known words, they are necessary to an understanding of the problem. Wherever the meaning of a word has notably changed, the sensetransformation is explained, as, for instance, in knave, marshal, phoney, adjectival rum: here we enter the domain of semantics, the science of meanings, for semantics will sometimes resolve an otherwise insoluble problem.

This book is the result of hunting on the Internet for unrecorded words. In these pages, you’ll find words you’ve never seen before - even though they’ve been around for decades. You’ll find old words with new definitions. You’ll find foreign words tiptoeing into foreign Englishes, sports jargon butting into politics, street slang bouncing out of California, and Spanish moving comfortably into mainstream American English. From dozens of countries, from politics and sports, slang and jargon, humdrum to extraordinary, new and old, what you’ll read is language that deserves a little more attention.