Tukuk-OS🗨️ Idioms
Plain meanings · real examples · origins dated or hedged honestly
An idiom is a small piece of frozen history. You cannot read "spill the beans" off its words, and half the pleasure is knowing why the phrase is shaped the way it is. Most idiom sites copy each other's lists and invent etymologies to fill space; these 30 are kept by hand — meaning, a real example, and an origin dated where the evidence allows and hedged where it does not.
⛵ Weather & the Sea
Sailors gave English half its idioms; the weather gave it the rest.
🫱 The Body
Ears, eyes, chins and chests — how the body runs the figurative English body.
🍞 Food & Drink
Cake, tea, bread and beans: the kitchen is a grammar of judgement.
🐾 Animals
Cats out of bags, horses held: barnyard and menagerie at work.
💼 Work & Money
Ledger ink, oil lamps and drawing boards — the office before offices.
The hedging is the point
Where a favourite story about a phrase has no evidence — cats falling off thatched roofs, a Danish nose tax — the page says so and leaves the tale where it belongs, in the folklorists' drawer. Where the print trail is solid (the drawing board is a 1941 New Yorker cartoon; extra miles are Matthew 5:41), the date is given so you can look it up. Related shelves: proverbs give the whole sayings these phrases live inside; the dictionary shelf covers the single words.