Words worth understanding
Start with the thought in plain English. Then explore the imagery, a practical example, when to use it, and what the saying does not mean.
4,000 entries with editorial explanations. The wider collection also contains entries still awaiting an individual interpretation.
proverb · Traditional
Watering thorns along with flowers gives a desired benefit accompanying effects. The saying asks what else an action nourishes when its target cannot be isolated.
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Fortune compared with variable olive abundance pictures changing circumstances. The saying contrasts plentiful periods with times of little or nothing.
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The phrase compares someone’s freshness with a daisy. It expresses an impression of being refreshed, lively or ready.
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The rhyme takes frogs croaking in a lagoon as a sign of rain soon. Sound becomes the cue for its short-term forecast.
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Frogs not drinking their whole pond picture use that leaves the supporting resource available. The saying connects consumption with the conditions sustaining it.
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The saying welcomes October wind for bringing acorns and mast within a hog’s reach. It judges a seasonal force through the provision it is imagined to supply.
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The saying pictures a heavily used route as unsuitable for grass. As a metaphor, it can connect repeated activity with what has little room to establish itself.
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The saying grows great oaks from little acorns. As an analogy, a small beginning may develop into something substantial.
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The saying grows a great oak from a small acorn. As an analogy, a modest beginning may develop into a substantial undertaking.
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The saying pairs a snowless Christmas with a snowy Easter. It imagines one seasonal condition being answered by its opposite later.
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The saying gives green wood a hot fire. It assigns a strong result to a described fuel without explaining the conditions or how green is being used.
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Hail is imagined as arriving with frost following behind it. The tail image turns a sequence of weather into a single creature-like visitor.
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The saying gives sunshine at a wedding and rain at a funeral favourable meanings. It assigns different weather wishes to two very different occasions.
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Understanding music equated with understanding the universe gives artistic insight an expansive significance. The saying values music as a way of experiencing a larger order.
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The saying calls hunger the best sauce. It suggests that appetite can make eating seem especially appealing.
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The rhyme predicts rain when bees stay at home. It treats their apparent inactivity as a weather sign.
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The saying reverses the apparent meaning of Candlemas weather: sunshine foretells more winter, while showers promise its end. It is a date-based forecasting rhyme.
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The saying predicts a severe winter when Christmas falls on a Monday. It assigns weather significance to the weekday of a calendar celebration.
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The saying takes summer-like conditions at the start of January as a sign of wintry conditions lasting into May. It predicts compensation for an unusually mild beginning.
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The saying predicts a dry spell from many spiders spinning webs. It makes visible activity a sign of the weather to come.
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The saying makes the ash leafing before the oak a sign of past or future drought. Its broad time window lets the same observation refer backward or forward.
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The saying predicts rain when clouds move against the wind. It makes a contrast between two perceived directions into a weather sign.
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The saying predicts different weather from whether the cock or hen moults first. The order of two animal changes is made a sign of variable or harsh conditions.
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The saying claims that rain on the first of July predicts more rain over four weeks. It turns one day’s condition into a prolonged expectation.
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