Idioms—phrases that come to mean more than each word's "literal meaning" on their own—have been a part of spoken language for a long time. They may change as the years go by and often vary ...

I cannot even begin to fathom the ballpark figure of how many idioms originate from the sporting realm, but let’s get the ball rolling and take a look at some of the familiar phrases that come ...

Old Norse used gabb to mean mockery, and in Old French, to gap meant “to joke.” The whole phrase gift of the gab seems to have emerged around 1680, and by the late 1700s , gab was frequently ...

Regardless of where the phrase came from, it quickly spread, and at some point, it was modified to talk cold turkey, which had essentially the same meaning: “to speak frankly and without reserve ...

If you ever feel like hiding out from the news, well, that impulse is hardly unique. There's a related expression from Italy that can mean to insulate yourself from the world's unpleasantness. NPR ...

Scientists trying to work out where a starfish’s head is have come to a startling conclusion: it is effectively the whole animal. As well as solving this longstanding mystery, the finding will ...

But, of course, what Trump meant was “scot-free,” a centuries-old phrase meaning to escape punishment, which has nothing to do with a person named Scott.

How does a sports term go on to become an idiom? Katherine Martin, head of U.S. Dictionaries at Oxford University Press joins the Morning Shift to talk about this phenomenon, ...

College professors have picked “doryangbalho" (跳梁跋扈), a four-character Chinese idiom meaning “running wild while exercising power at will,” as the expression that best describes ...