Search Results for food | Strange Phrases

Eat out of house and home

Meaning To gobble all the food or drain a place.

Also known as Eat out

Origin … have learned the recipe from a Hopi healer. Under the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, federal investigators eventually seized and analysed his liniment, finding it contained no snake oil at all, just mineral…

Also known as selling snake oil · snake oil merchant · snake-oil peddler · snake-oil salesman

A lone wolf

Origin … - a young adult that leaves its natal pack because food is scarce or the pack has grown too large, then travels long distances to find a mate and found a new pack. Solitude is a brief transitional phase, not…

Also known as a bit of a lone wolf · lone wolves · lone-wolf (adjective)

An apple a day keeps the doctor away

Meaning … about the value of good habits and simple, wholesome food, sometimes extended jokingly to other daily routines. Proverbial and usually half-joking; fine in speech and light writing. Modern nutrition supports…

Also known as an apple a day · eat an apple on going to bed and you'll keep the doctor from earning your bread

Doppelgänger

Origin … appears in the same novel, playing on Gang, a course of food. English printers used it as a German word from 1824 and in English usage by 1826, initially for the 'apparition of a living person'…

Also known as doppelgaenger · doubleganger

Tuckered out

Origin … that same year. It probably developed from tuck meaning food, appetite, or the energy supplied by eating: to tucker something out was to exhaust its store. The related take the tuck out of, meaning sap…

Also known as all tuckered out · take the tuck out of · tucker out

Money to burn

Origin … who were leaving for the Outside because they could buy no food. No individual coiner is documented; the phrase looks like a natural exaggeration of the older idea of wealth one does not know what to do with…

Also known as got money to burn · have money to burn · with money to burn

On the fiddle

Origin … the raised rim or frame on a sailor's plate that kept food from sliding in a seaway; a sailor whose food piled above the rim was supposedly 'on the fiddle', taking more than his share. The tableware genuinely…

Also known as at the fiddle · fiddle the books · fiddling expenses · on a bit of a fiddle

Eat humble pie

Origin … edible inner parts, of an animal, especially a deer. The food name is recorded in the seventeenth century. Because umble and humble sounded alike, humble pie later invited an association with humility…

Meat and drink

Origin The phrase rests on the old sense of 'meat' as food in general - Old English mete - which survives in 'sweetmeat'. 'Meat and drink' named literal sustenance through the Middle Ages, and the figurative use 'to…

Also known as be meat and drink to · be meat and drink to someone · meat and drink for someone · meat and drink to me

High on the hog

Origin … contrasts costlier pork chops and ham with cheaper food. This supports an association with desirable cuts from the upper part of a pig, although older uses of 'live high' also helped make the luxury sense…

Also known as Eat high on the hog · High off the hog · Live high off the hog

The Midas touch

Origin … be changed to gold - and immediately regrets it, as his food, his drink, and in later retellings his daughter harden into metal at his touch. Only washing in the river Pactolus, whose golden sands the myth…

Also known as have the Midas touch · reverse Midas touch · the golden touch

Chalk and cheese

Origin Medieval in origin and one of the oldest food comparisons in English. The earliest known record is John Gower's Confessio Amantis of the 1390s - 'Lo, how they feignen chalk for chese' - originally about…

Also known as as different as chalk and cheese · different as chalk and cheese · like chalk and cheese

Gone to the dogs

Origin … expression rests on the historically low status of dogs: food and goods unfit for humans were thrown to the dogs, so things 'going to the dogs' implied they were fit only for animals, an idea related to the…

Also known as go to the dogs · going to the dogs · going to the dogs fast · let it go to the dogs

One for the road

Origin … element has 18th-century antecedents: travellers carried food and drink 'for the road', and an early printed example appears in The Beauties of All the Magazines Selected for 1763. The full phrase with 'one'…

Also known as a quick one for the road · have one for the road · one more for the road

A battle of wills

Origin … wherever conflict is psychological rather than physical - food, bedtime, contracts, borders. This entry follows the catalogue's treatment of comparable phrases, such as 'draw first blood', for which…

Also known as battle of wills · battles of wills · clash of wills · war of wills

Blow hot and cold

Origin … a traveller blows on his hands to warm them and on his food to cool it, leading the satyr to distrust someone who blows hot and cold with the same mouth. The fable explains the metaphor, but it does not date…

Also known as Blow both hot and cold · Blow hot and cold with the same breath · Run hot and cold

Down in the dumps

Origin … of melancholy, echoing a note attached to John Gay's verse; no such king existed, and the rival idea that dumps comes from dumpling is also false, since the melancholy sense predates the food word in English…

Also known as a bit down in the dumps · feel down in the dumps · in the dumps

High muckety-muck

Origin … filtered through Chinook Jargon. Muck-a-muck meant food or eating, probably from a Nuu-chah-nulth source, while hiyu meant much or plenty; English speakers reshaped hiyu as high. High muck-a-muck was applied…

Also known as high muck-a-muck · high muckamuck · muck-a-muck · muckety-muck

Root, hog, or die

Origin … turning hogs loose to forage: the animal had to root for food or starve. An Ohio newspaper called it a proverb in 1829, and Davy Crockett used it as an old saying in his 1834 autobiography. The line later…

Also known as root hog or die · root, hog, or - die

Come the raw prawn

Origin … unpalatable or hard to swallow, but the National Dictionary Centre does not identify a conclusive source event. It is therefore safer to retain the food metaphor without inventing a more specific story…

Also known as Come the raw prawn with someone · Don't come the raw prawn · Try the raw-prawn act

Put your foot in it

Origin … American verbal form. Older British sayings blamed spoiled food on a bishop who had 'put his foot in the pot,' but etymologists have not established a simple, direct line from that 16th-century tradition to…

Also known as Foot in mouth · Put one's foot in it · Put one's foot in one's mouth · Put your foot in your mouth

The whole enchilada

Origin The food word entered American English in 1876 from Mexican Spanish enchilada, but the figurative use is mid-twentieth-century US slang. The earliest known citation - the OED's first, surfaced via Wiktionary…

Also known as the big enchilada · the full enchilada · whole enchiladas (rare plural)

Cook someone's goose

Origin … walls; and a town that displayed a goose to prove it had food, only for attackers to destroy it - but etymologists dismiss all of these as implausible given the gap of centuries or the vagueness of the…

Also known as cook his goose · someone's goose is cooked · the goose is cooked

“food”