t
(SMS) tea


ta
(SMS) thanks again


tabby
A domestic cat with a striped and mottled coat.
Etymology: The silks created by weavers in Baghdad, Iraq, were inspired by the varied colors and markings of cat coats. These fabrics were called "tabby" by European traders.

tabloid
In 1878, Henry Wellcome went into partnership with his fellow American Silas Burroughs to set up a pharmaceutical business in London. They needed a word for the highly compressed pills that his firm produced. "Tablet" wouldn't serve, as it was a much older term (literally a little table) used since the sixteenth century to mean any kind of solid medicine made up in small flat rectangles. Wellcome created "tabloid" from "tablet" plus the ending "-oid" that meant "having the form or likeness of"; this was registered as a trademark in 1884. As well as drugs, the company used the brand name for other products, such as photographic chemicals and tea (though presumably not sold in tablet form). The problem came near the end of the century when people started to use the word for anything of compressed compass, for example for the Daily Mail, a newspaper in half-pint format that had been first published in May 1896 under the slogan "The penny newspaper for one halfpenny". This was the precursor of all modern tabloids, with an emphasis on short stories simply told, on sport and human interest topics, and with the innovation of a women's page. The first recorded use of "tabloid" for this style of journalism is from the very beginning of the twentieth century, from the Westminster Gazette of 1 January 1901. In 1903, Burroughs Wellcome sued Thompson and Capper, a Manchester firm, for using their trademark without permission. In its defence, that firm pointed out that "tabloid" was by then widely used, mentioning recent issues of Punch, Tatler, Nature, and the Daily Mirror (another tabloid, founded that year), which had employed phrases such as, e.g., "opera in tabloid", "tabloid melodrama", "knowledge in tabloid form", "tabloid missives" and "modern art in tabloid". Burroughs Wellcome, it was argued, had thereby lost all rights to "tabloid" and that the action was "an attempt on the part of the plaintiff to prevent the proper development of the English language". Burroughs Wellcome won; the judge agreed that the word had indeed acquired a secondary sense of "a compressed form or dose of anything", but that it didn't interfere with the firm's trademark rights. These days, of course, the sense of a type of tablet has long since passed out of use and "tabloid" refers solely to a small-format popular newspaper. Except, of course, when it's a broadsheet in disguise.


tabula rasa

• tabula
• rasa

[tab-yuh-luh-RAH-zuh]
1. The mind in its hypothetical primary blank or empty state before receiving outside impressions.
2. Something existing in its original pristine state.
Example:
Our newly built house, with its unpainted walls, is a tabula rasa awaiting our decorative touches.
History:
Philosophers have been arguing that babies are born with minds that are essentially blank slates since the days of Aristotle. (Later, some psychologists took up the case as well.) English speakers have called that initial state of mental blankness "tabula rasa" (a term taken from a Latin phrase that translates as "smooth or erased tablet") since the 16th century, but it wasn't until British philosopher John Locke championed the concept in his "Essay Concerning Human Understanding" in 1690 that the term gained widespread popularity in our language. In later years, a figurative sense of the term emerged, referring to something that exists in its original state and that has yet to be altered by outside forces.


tacit

• implied

an adjective meaning "expressed without words"
Synonym: implied
Etymology:
The word is a descendent of the verb "tacere," meaning "to be silent". "Tacit" has been used since 1576.

taciturn
temperamentally disinclined to talk
Example:
Upon hearing that soft-spoken Calvin Coolidge - arguably the most taciturn president in U.S. history - had died, Dorothy Parker quipped, "How could they tell?".
Etymology:
We first find "taciturn" in a satiric drama written in 1734 by James Miller, a British clergyman educated at Oxford. A character describes a nephew thus: "When he was little, he never was what they call Roguish or Waggish, but was always close, quiet, and taciturn." It seems we waited unduly long to adopt this useful descendent of the verb "tacere", meaning "to be silent" - we were much quicker to adopt other words from the "tacere" family. We've been using "tacit", an adjective meaning "expressed without words" or "implied," since 1576. And we've had the noun "taciturnity", meaning "habitual silence", since at least 1450.


taciturnity
habitual silence
Etymology:
The word is a descendent of the verb "tacere," meaning "to be silent". "Taciturnity" has been used since at least 1450.


tag along

• tag
• along

1. To follow someone around.
2. A person who follows someone around.
Examples:
1) You're going to the new coffee shop? Do you mind if I tag along? 2) My little brother is such a tag along - he follows me everywhere I go!
Etymology:
A 'tag' is a piece of paper that hangs from something - for example, there is a 'tag' on a new pair of pants to tell you how much they cost. 'Along' means 'with' or 'beside'. So to 'tag along' means to go with somebody but to follow their lead, to 'hang' on them as they go about their business.


take at one's word

• take smb. at his word
• take at
• word
• take
• take up on
• take smb. up on smth.
• take up

To believe everything someone says; to act on what is said.
Example:
If you say you never watch TV, I'll take you at your word and throw this TV-set out of the window.
Synonym: take (smb.) up on (smth.)

take it on the chin

• take it on
• chin
• take it
• on the chin
• take

1. To be badly beaten or hurt.
Example:
Our football team really took it on the chin today. they are all bumps and bruises. Mother and I took it on the chin in the card game.
2. To accept without complaint something bad that happens to you; accept trouble or defeat calmly.
Example:
A good football player can take it on the chin when his team loses.
Synonym: take things on the chin

take its toll

• take
• toll

To be damaging or harmful, cause loss or destruction.
Examples:
1) The civil war has taken its toll on both sides.
2) The heavy truck traffic has taken its toll on the highways.
3) His new job and the long hours have begun to take their toll on his health.
Etymology:
This expression transfers the taking of "toll", a tribute or tax, to exacting other costs. [Late 1800s.]
Incidentally, though the tolling of bells is often associated with death (remember John Donne: "Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee"), the verb comes from another source, probably a special use of the dialect "toll", meaning "to drag or pull", which was transferred from the pulling of the bell rope to the sound of the bell.



take public

• take the company public
• take
• company
• public

sell shares in a company to the general public
Examples:
1) We decided it was necessary to take our company public in order to raise money to expand our facilities.
2) After dinner he made an announcement he would soon regret: he was going to take the company public.
Synonym:
take the company public
Explanation:
In American business, there are single proprietor businesses, partnerships, and Corporations. Small businesses are usually one of the first two. When the business starts to get bigger, the owner incorporates and sells the stock in the company, or takes (the company) public. It has its advantages and disadvantages.


take the bull by the horns

• take by
• take
• bull
• horns
• horn

To deal with a problem directly and resolutely; to confront a problem or challenge.
Examples:
1) I took the bull by the horns and finished the assignment a week early. 2) If you don't take the bull by the horns and ask your boss for a raise, you'll never get one.
Etymology: This phrase comes from astrology. Taurus, the bull, has a reputation for trouble and difficulty. If you grab the horns of this difficult beast and bring it under control, it's like dealing directly and forcefully with your problems.


take things on the chin

• take things
• on the chin
• take things easy
• take it easy
• take
• thing
• things
• chin
• easy

To accept without complaint something bad that happens to you; accept trouble or defeat calmly.
Example:
The doctor says I'm supposed to take things on the chin for a while.
Synonyms: take things easy, take it easy


take up on

• take smb. up on smth.
• take smb. up on
• take up
• take smb. up
• take
• take smb. at his word
• take at one's word
• word

1. To accept something from somebody; to accept somebody's offer or wager. Example:
You've offered to help me, and I'll take you up on that sometime.
2. To take someone at his word.
Example:
Since a politician never believes what he says, he is quite surprised to be taken up on.


take-home pay


talisman
[TAL-iss-mun]
1. An object held to act as a charm to avert evil and bring good fortune.
2. Something producing apparently magical or miraculous effects.
Example:
When the pop quiz was announced, Sam reached for his lucky penny, hoping the talisman would bring him success.
Etymology:
The Englishmen might have borrowed "talisman" from French, Spanish, or Italian; all three include similar-looking words for a lucky charm. Those three terms derive from a single Arabic word for a charm, "tilsam." "Tilsam" in turn can be traced to the ancient Greek verb "talein," which means "to initiate into the mysteries."


talk trash

• talk
• trash

To use bad words while competing; to try to intimidate an opponent with foul language.
Examples:
1) He's always talking trash on the basketball court. 2) The other team was talking trash the whole game, but we beat them anyway.
Etymology: This phrase comes from basketball. 'Trash' refers to worthless or dirty things, and 'talk' refers to speech. Some players curse and say bad things in order to distract or intimidate the other team.

tamale

• chili
• guacamole
• chipotle

[tuh-MAH-lee]
Cornmeal dough rolled with ground meat or beans seasoned usually with chili, wrapped usually in corn husks, and steamed.
Example:
As... the Swedish winter grew bitter and dark, I desperately needed comfort food. Enchiladas and tamales would have done just fine. (Edward Barrios Acevedo, Scripps Howard News Service, March 31, 2005)
Etymology, related words:
"Tamale" gives you one; it came to English (by way of Mexican Spanish) from the Nahuatl - a group of languages spoken by native peoples of Mexico and Central America - "tamalli," a word for steamed cornmeal dough. Add to the menu "chili" (from "chilli," identifying all those fiery peppers); "chocolate" (from "chocolatl," first used for a beverage made from chocolate and water); "guacamole" (from "ahuacatl," meaning "avocado," plus "molli," meaning "sauce"); and "tomato" (from "tomatl"). Top it all off with a word that's new to the English dictionary: "chipotle" (a smoked and dried pepper), from "chilli" + "poctli" (meaning "something smoked").


tanorexia
The state of always feeling "not tan enough"; the condition of being addicted to tanning.
Example:
Females in their teens and twenties have been swallowed into a new beauty craze  tanorexia.
Etymology:
The term can be traced back at least to the mid-1990s; though it is known from American sources, the majority are British. The obvious pun on "anorexia" does make a kind of sense, since the Greek root of the latter word is "orexis" ("appetite"), so that "tanorexia" might be thought of as an excess appetite for tanning. The word has been coined by doctors alarmed at the spiralling numbers of youngsters putting themselves at risk of skin cancer as they chase the perfect skin colour.


tantamount

• tantamount

[TANT-uh-mount]
equivalent in value, significance, or effect
Example:
The boss had told Morris that he was being reassigned to the shipping department, and he knew that it was tantamount to a demotion.
History:
"Tantamount" comes from the Anglo-French phrase "tant amunter," meaning "to amount to as much." This phrase comes from the Old French "tant," meaning "so much" or "as much," and "amounter," meaning "to ascend" or "to add up to." When "tantamount" first entered English, it was used similarly to the Anglo-French phrase, as a verb meaning "to be equivalent." "His not denying tant-amounteth to the affirming of the matter," wrote clergyman Thomas Fuller in 1659, for example. There was also a noun "tantamount" in the 17th century, but the adjective is the only commonly used form of the term nowadays.


tapping the Admiral

• tap the Admiral
• tapping
• the Admiral
• tap
• Admiral
• suck the monkey
• sucking the monkey
• suck
• monkey
• sucking

(Royal Navy slang)
1. surreptitious drinking
2. getting an unauthorized drink of rum via a surreptitious straw
3. take a small quantity of strong drink
Etymology & Synonym:
Various versions exist of this wild tale but all purport to describe what happened to the body of Admiral Nelson after his death at the battle of Trafalgar. His remains, it is said, were put in a cask of rum to preserve them on the voyage back to Britain. Sailors who would do anything for a drink bored a hole in the cask with a gimlet and drew off quantities of the rum through a straw. So many did so that when the body arrived in London the cask was found to be nearly empty. Though Nelson's body was preserved in this way, albeit in brandy not rum, the story is clearly a folk legend. Similar ghoulish tales have been told in many circumstances, including one of a couple who bought a house that had once been an inn and who were delighted to find that one of the old casks in the cellar still held rum. Only after they had emptied it and cut the cask in two to make plant containers for the garden did they find the well-preserved remains of a man inside. Jan Harald Brunvand, the American academic who has made a lifelong study of such legends, has told versions in one of his books, including a related one dating back six hundred years about some tomb robbers in Egypt. Other tales tell of containers holding similarly preserved bodies of monkeys or apes that spring a leak on their way from Africa to museums; the leaking spirits are consumed with a gusto that turns to horror when the truth of the situation emerges. Though the story about Lord Nelson is folklore, like all good tales it's grounded in an acute understanding of the cupidity of human beings, provides a moral lesson, and is based on real situations. Important persons who died at sea in centuries past did indeed have their corpses preserved in a barrel of spirits so they could be brought home for proper burial (embalming didn't arrive until the 1860s and even then wasn't available at sea). A related expression, "suck the monkey" was current in the London docks in the 19th century to describe the practice of boring a hole in a cask of spirits to steal the contents; this might conceivably have built on the tale about monkeys' bodies preserved in casks of spirits, though it is more likely to have had a different origin. The expression "tapping the Admiral" appeared in the Royal Navy in the late 19th century. We may deride the folk tale about sailors sipping from the cask containing Nelson's body, but it does seem to be the origin of the expression.


tarradiddle

• taradiddle
• diddle
• didrian

[tair-uh-DID-uhl]
Also: taradiddle
1. A petty falsehood; a fib.
2. Pretentious nonsense.
3. (archaic) the act or time of tarrying; delay; lateness
Examples:
1) Oh please! Even in the parallel universe, tarradiddles of this magnitude cannot go unchallenged. ("Taxation in the parallel universe", Sunday Business, June 11, 2000)
2) Mr B did not tell a whopper. This was no fib, plumper, porker or tarradiddle. There was definitely no deceit, mendacity or fabrication. ("Looking back", Western Mail, May 11, 2002)
3) And after two days' tarriance there, they returned.
Etymology:
The true origin of "taradiddle" is unknown, but there's a lot of balderdash about its history. Some folks try to connect it to the verb "diddle" (meaning "to cheat"), but that hasn't been proven and may turn out to be poppycock. One may hear some tommyrot about it coming from the Old English verb "didrian", which meant "to deceive", but that couldn't be true unless "didrian" was somehow suddenly revived after eight or nine centuries of disuse. No one even knows when "taradiddle" was first used, though it must have been long before it showed up in a 1796 dictionary of colloquial speech (where it was defined as a synonym of "fib").


tarred with the same brush

• be tarred with the same brush
• tar with the same brush
• painted with the same brush
• be painted with the same brush
• paint with the same brush
• tarred with
• the same brush
• tarred
• same brush
• tar with
• tar
• same
• brush

1. Not better, not at all more desirable
2. Include in the same group, generalize
Synonym:
painted with the same brush
History, examples:
There's nothing directly racist in its history, though there are such huge sensitivities in the United States and elsewhere over any expression that sounds as though it might be (as, for example, with words and phrases such as "niggardly", "call a spade a spade", and so on). As it happens, it doesn't have anything directly to do with tarring and feathering, either, which is an American vigilante punishment known from the eighteenth century (it's first recorded in Boston) and wasn't usually a punishment of blacks by whites but of whites by other whites. The origin is the verb "to tar", meaning to defile or dirty, known from the early years of the seventeenth century. The idiom appears in print first in 1818, in one of Sir Walter Scott's novels, "Rob Roy": "They are a' tarr'd wi' the same stick - rank Jacobites and Papists." Our modern form appears in William Cobbett's "Rural Rides" in 1823: "'You are all tarred with the same brush', said the sensible people of Maidstone." The idea behind it is that two individuals who have been liberally daubed or painted with the same tar brush look much the same and so appear to have the same characteristics. The links of the colour black with matters that were detestable, dishonourable or evil also added to the negative sense.

tatterdemalion
[tat-uhr-dih-MAYL-yuhn; -MAY-lee-uhn]
1. A person dressed in tattered or ragged clothing.
Synonym: ragamuffin.
2. Tattered; ragged.
Examples:
1) Last time peasant blouses surfaced, in the 1960s and '70s, they were part of an epidemic of Indian bedspread dresses, homemade blue-jean skirts, Army surplus jackets, Greek bookbag purses and love beads, the whole eclectic tatterdemalion mix meant to express egalitarian sentiments and countercultural solidarity with underdogs everywhere. (Patricia McLaughlin, "The peasant look," Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine, April 25, 1999)
2) I was expecting a wild hair, clanking jewelry, a tatterdemalion velvet cape from whose folds wafted the scent of incense, a house full of candles, dream catchers, cats, and bad art. (David Rakoff, "Fraud")
3) To my ear, though, the prose has the tatterdemalion feel of something hooked together by commas, tacked together by periods. (Brad Leithauser,"Capturer of Hearts," New York Times, April 7, 1996)
Etymology:
"Tatterdemalion" derives from "tatter" + "-demalion", of unknown origin, though perhaps from Old French "maillon" - "long clothes, swadding clothes" or Italian "maglia" - "undershirt."


tattoo
[ta-TOO]
1. A rapid, rhythmic drumming or rapping.
2. A beat of a drum, or sound of a trumpet or bugle, giving notice to soldiers to go to their quarters at night.
Examples:
1) A display of military exercises given as evening entertainment. Joss blew out her breath, stamped her feet in a short tattoo, and sat jiggling one leg. (John Casey, "The Half-life of Happiness")
2) There are more golf courses per person in Naples than anywhere else in the world, and in spite of the hot, angry weather everyone around the hotel was dressed to play, their cleated shoes tapping out a clickety-clickety-clickety tattoo on the sidewalks. (Susan Orlean, "The Orchid Thief")
3) With a steady tattoo of bad news beginning to offset what had been one of the most vibrant parts of the U.S. economy, "we are less optimistic than we were two months ago about the speed of the bounce back," Mr. Williams said. (Eduardo Porter, "California's Economic Slowdown Is Expected to Last Much Longer," Wall Street Journal, April 5, 2001)
Etymology:
"Tattoo" is an alteration of earlier "taptoo", from Dutch "