brass monkeys

adj

Etymology

From the phrase cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey - supposedly a reference to the brass container for cannon balls on a British man-of-war (but this seems to have been discredited).

Definitions

  1. Very cold.

    • Blimey, it's brass monkeys out there today.
  2. plural of brass monkey

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for brass monkeys. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA