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An idiom (Latin: idioma, "special property", f. Greek: ἰδίωμα – idiōma, "special feature, special phrasing", f. Greek: ἴδιος – idios, "one’s own") is an expression, word, or phrase that has a figurative meaning that is comprehended in regard to a common use of that expression that is separate from the literal meaning or definition of the words of which it is made.^[1] There are estimated to be at least 25,000 idiomatic expressions in the English language.^[2]

In linguistics, idioms are usually presumed to be figures of speech contradicting the principle of compositionality; yet the matter remains debated.^{[citation needed]} In phraseology, they are defined in a similar way as a sub-type of phraseme whose meaning is not the regular sum of the meanings of its components.^[3] John Saeed defines an "idiom" as words collocated that became affixed to each other until metamorphosing into a fossilised term.^[4] This collocation—words commonly used in a group—redefines each component word in the word-group and becomes an idiomatic expression. When taken jointly as a single, stand-alone entity, rather than being analyzed in terms of its words' separate literal meanings, the phrase develops a specialized meaning, thereby becoming an idiom. Moreover, an idiom is an expression, word, or phrase whose sense means something different from what the words literally imply. The idiom "beating around the bush" means to hint or discuss obliquely; nobody is literally beating any person or thing, and the bush is a metaphor. When a speaker uses an idiom, someone listening to that speaker might attribute an incorrect meaning to that idiom if the listener has not encountered that specific figure of speech before.^[5] Idioms usually do not translate well; in some cases, when an idiom is translated into another language, either its meaning is changed or it is meaningless.

When two or three words are often used together in a particular sequence, the words are said to be irreversible binomials, or Siamese twins. Usage will prevent the words from being displaced or rearranged. For example, a person may be left "high and dry" but never "dry and high." This idiom in turn means that the person is left in their former condition rather than being assisted so that their condition improves. Not all Siamese twins are idioms, however. "Reading, writing, and arithmetic" is a frozen trinomial, but it is usually taken literally.

Background[link]

In the English expression to kick the bucket, a listener knowing only the meanings of kick and bucket would be unable to deduce the expression's true meaning: to die. Although this idiomatic phrase can, in fact, actually refer to kicking a bucket, native speakers of English rarely use it so. Cases like this are "opaque idioms".

Literal translation (word-by-word) of opaque idioms will not convey the same meaning in other languages – an analogous expression in Polish is kopnąć w kalendarz ("to kick the calendar"), with "calendar" detached from its usual meaning, just like "bucket" in the English phrase. In Bulgarian, the closest analogous phrase is da ritnesh kambanata ("да ритнеш камбаната", "to kick the bell"); in Danish, at stille træskoene ("to take off the clogs"); in Dutch, het loodje leggen ("to lay the piece of lead"); in Finnish, potkaista tyhjää ("to kick the void"); in French, manger des pissenlits par la racine ("to eat dandelions by the root"); in German, den Löffel abgeben ("to give the spoon away") or ins Gras beißen ("to bite into the grass"); in Greek, τινάζω τα πέταλα ("to shake the horse-shoes"); in Latvian, nolikt karoti ("to put the spoon down");^[6] in Norwegian, å parkere tøflene ("to park the slippers"); in Portuguese, bater as botas ("to beat the boots"); in Spanish, estirar la pata (to stretch one's leg); in Swedish, trilla av pinnen ("to fall off the stick"); and in Ukrainian, врізати дуба ("to cut the oak", as in building a coffin). In Brazil, the expression "to kick the bucket" (chutar o balde) has a completely different meaning (to give up on a difficult task, since a person coming to the end of their patience might kick a bucket in frustration).

Some idioms, in contrast, are "transparent idioms" ^[7]: much of their meaning does get through if they are taken (or translated) literally. For example, "lay one's cards on the table" meaning to reveal previously unknown intentions, or to reveal a secret. Transparency is a matter of degree; "spill the beans" (to let secret information become known) and "leave no stone unturned" (to do everything possible in order to achieve or find something) are not entirely literally interpretable, but only involve a slight metaphorical broadening.

Another category of idioms is a word having several meanings, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes discerned from the context of its usage. This is seen in the (mostly un-inflected) English language in polysemes, the common use of the same word for an activity, for those engaged in it, for the product used, for the place or time of an activity, and sometimes for a verb.

Idioms tend to confuse those unfamiliar with them; students of a new language must learn its idiomatic expressions as vocabulary. Many natural language words have idiomatic origins, but are assimilated, so losing their figurative senses, for example, in Portuguese, the expression "saber de coração" (meaning "to know by heart", with the same meaning as in English), was shortened to "saber de cor", and, later, to the verb "decorar", meaning "memorize".

Idioms of a language can be hard to translate to other languages, or translate to the wrong meaning. Richard Lederer told a (probably apocryphal) story that when the proverb “out of sight, out of mind” was fed into a translating machine at the United Nations through Chinese and back to English, the resulting phrase was “invisible, insane” (most likely using the prefix "in-" for "not"). He tried again with the idiom “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” with the translation this time reading: “the wine is good but the meat is off.”^[8] This wrong translation is due to the usage of the wrong meaning rather than a difficulty in translating the meaning of the idiom.

Culturally relative[link]

An idiom is generally a colloquial metaphor^{[citation needed]}—a term requiring some foundational knowledge, information, or experience, to use only within a culture, where conversational parties must possess common cultural references. Therefore, idioms are not considered part of the language, but part of the culture. As culture typically is localized, idioms often are useless beyond their local context; nevertheless, some idioms can be more universal than others, can be easily translated, and the metaphoric meaning can be deduced.

As defined by The New International Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, an idiom is an expression not readily analyzable from its grammatical construction or from the meaning of its component parts. It is the part of the distinctive form or construction of a particular language that has a specific form or style present only in that language.^{[cite this quote]} Random House Webster’s College Dictionary seems to agree with this definition, even expanding it further, stating that an idiom is an expression whose meaning is not predictable from the usual grammatical rules of a language or from the usual meanings of its constituent elements.^{[cite this quote]} Unlike many other aspects of language, an idiom does not readily change as time passes. Some idioms gain and lose favor in popular culture, but they rarely have any actual shift in their construction. Additionally, people sometimes have a tendency to exaggerate what they mean, giving birth to new idioms by accident.

Many idiomatic expressions are based upon conceptual metaphors such as "time as a substance", "time as a path", "love as war", and "up is more"; the metaphor is essential, not the idioms. For example, "spend time", "battle of the sexes", and "back in the day" are idiomatic and based upon essential metaphors. These "deep metaphors" and their relationship to human cognition are discussed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in Metaphors We Live By (1980).

In forms such as "profits are up", the metaphor is carried by "up" itself. The phrase "profits are up" is not an idiom; anything measurable can supplant "profits": "crime is up", "satisfaction is up", "complaints are up" et cetera. Essential idioms generally involve prepositions, e.g. "out of" and "turn into".

Likewise, many Chinese characters are idiomatic constructs, since their meanings are often not traceable to a literal (pictographic) meaning of their radicals. Because characters are composed from a small base of some 214 radicals, their assembled meanings follow different interpretation modes —from the pictographic to the metaphoric to those that have lost their original meanings.

See also[link]

Linguistics portal

• Adage
• Befudiom
• Chengyu
• Cliché
• Collocation
• Double negative
• Figure of speech
• List of idioms in the English language

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Leaney, Cindy, In the know : understanding and using idioms, Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN 978-0-521-54542-6

External links[link]

Look up idiom, Category:Idioms, or Category:English idioms in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Figures of Speech by Rob Bradshaw
• Library of Phrases
• American idioms at Learning English Feels Good
• American Idiomatic Expressions, based on the book A Dictionary of American Idioms
• Dictionary of English Idioms & Idiomatic Expressions
• The Phrase Finder
• WikIdioms
• Today's English Idioms at GoEnglish.com