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The American Heritage Dictionary Of Idioms
Christine Ammer
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
March 2013
On Sale: February 26, 2013
512 pages
ISBN: 0547676581
EAN: 9780547676586
Kindle: B00BVTMIDQ
Paperback / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
Bite the bullet, make no bones about it, take the cake.
Expressions like these abound in English, yet they can’t be
understood literally based solely on the meanings of the
words they’re made up of. The American Heritage® Dictionary
of Idioms is a detailed exploration of these and other
idiomatic expressions, including phrasal verbs such as kick
back, proverbs such as too many cooks spoil the broth,
interjections such as tough beans, and figures of speech
such as dark horse and push up daisies. Among the surprises
in store as readers peruse the pages of this book are the
fact that the seemingly modern term person of color actually
dates from the late 1700s; that mutual admiration society
was coined by Henry David Thoreau; that in 18th-century
Britain birthday suit referred to the clothes one wore on
the king’s birthday; and that the origins of on the
up-and-up, put the kibosh on, and the whole nine yards are
unknown. The first edition of the American Heritage® Dictionary of
Idioms was notable not only for its wealth of information
but also for the perceptiveness and wit with which it
provided cultural and historical context to its definitions.
Now, fifteen years after the publication of that first
edition, author Christine Ammer has extensively revised and
expanded her original text to keep up both with historical
scholarship and with ongoing changes in the English
language. The result is an up-to-date dictionary that
defines over 10,000 idiomatic expressions in greater detail
than any other dictionary available today.
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