provide s] informative and entertaining browsing, depicting how filled our language is with sports metaphors, many of whose derivations are little known: the devil to pay, ' hazard a guess, ' red herring, ' etc. Even libraries with numerous other sports dictionaries will want this work. Recommended for high school, public, and academic libraries. Choice

This comprehensive dictionary brings together for the first time the popular words and expressions in American English that derive from terms associated with sports, games, and recreation. Many of these terms are now an...

No other nonhuman source has served as the basis for more metaphors than animals. Speaking of Animals is a dictionary of animal metaphors that are current in American English. It is comprehensive, historical, and metaphor-based. Each entry refers to the other dictionaries that catalog that same metaphor, and the dates of first appearance in writing are supplied, where possible, for both the metaphor and the name of the source. The main text is organized alphabetically by metaphor rather than by animal or animal behavior; all the metaphors are classified according to their animal...

Each of the more than seven hundred entries in the dictionary contains a description of the historical background of each of the two types of language, literal and nonliteral, and provides an explanation for the relationship between them. Wherever possible, dates of first record in English are provided, along with the bibliographical sources of these dates; and all of the works that record those terms and expressions are given in coded form as listed in the Key to Works Cited.

A Guide to Reading the Entries illustrates the typical form of an entry by analyzing an example from the...