English-Russian/Russian-English Dictionary of Idioms

Book excerpt: An idiom is a group of words the actual meaning of which cannot easily be predicted from the specific meanings of the component words. Both the English and Russian languages are highly idiomatic. The use of idioms is natural to the speakers of a particular language, but has less or even no meaning to the speakers of another language. However, in any colloquial language there are also a host of overlapping idiomatic expressions, proverbs, phrases, and sayings which stretch the idiom definition. Moreover, there are often alternative words for certain words in an idiom, some idioms have more than one meaning, and extensive groupings have been made under certain major verbs and nouns. All these variations are given in this dictionary. This volume contains the most comprehensive dictionary of English to Russian and equivalent Russian to English idioms available worldwide today. There are in total about 10,000 entries of different idioms, but many have several alternatives in their groupings, which makes the overall total several times that number.