"brass monkey" meaning in English

See brass monkey in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Adjective

Audio: en-au-brass monkey.ogg [Australia]
Etymology: From the phrase cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey. According to the U.S. Naval Historical Center, which cites the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, 'the first recorded use of the term "brass monkey" appears to dates^([sic]) to 1857 when it was used in an apparently vulgar context by C.A. Abbey in his book Before the Mast in the Clippers, where on page 108 it says "It would freeze the tail off a brass monkey."' A number of false etymologies have been suggested. For more information, see brass monkey on Wikipedia.Wikipedia. Etymology templates: {{m|en|cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey}} cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey, {{SIC}} ^([sic]), {{pedia}} brass monkey on Wikipedia.Wikipedia Head templates: {{en-adj|-}} brass monkey (not comparable)
  1. (idiomatic, of the weather) Very cold. Tags: idiomatic, not-comparable
    Sense id: en-brass_monkey-en-adj-mLL1FlZe

Noun

Audio: en-au-brass monkey.ogg [Australia] Forms: brass monkeys [plural]
Etymology: From the phrase cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey. According to the U.S. Naval Historical Center, which cites the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, 'the first recorded use of the term "brass monkey" appears to dates^([sic]) to 1857 when it was used in an apparently vulgar context by C.A. Abbey in his book Before the Mast in the Clippers, where on page 108 it says "It would freeze the tail off a brass monkey."' A number of false etymologies have been suggested. For more information, see brass monkey on Wikipedia.Wikipedia. Etymology templates: {{m|en|cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey}} cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey, {{SIC}} ^([sic]), {{pedia}} brass monkey on Wikipedia.Wikipedia Head templates: {{en-noun}} brass monkey (plural brass monkeys)
  1. Alternative letter-case form of Brass Monkey (“cocktail”) Tags: alt-of Alternative form of: Brass Monkey (extra: cocktail) Categories (topical): Temperature, Weather
    Sense id: en-brass_monkey-en-noun-mgq1FcHq Disambiguation of Temperature: 3 97 Disambiguation of Weather: 3 97 Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header, English entries with topic categories using raw markup, English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 1 99 Disambiguation of English entries with topic categories using raw markup: 5 95 Disambiguation of English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys: 6 94

Inflected forms

Download JSON data for brass monkey meaning in English (4.8kB)

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  "etymology_text": "From the phrase cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey. According to the U.S. Naval Historical Center, which cites the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, 'the first recorded use of the term \"brass monkey\" appears to dates^([sic]) to 1857 when it was used in an apparently vulgar context by C.A. Abbey in his book Before the Mast in the Clippers, where on page 108 it says \"It would freeze the tail off a brass monkey.\"' A number of false etymologies have been suggested. For more information, see brass monkey on Wikipedia.Wikipedia.",
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  "pos": "adj",
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        {
          "text": "It's brass monkey weather today, isn't it?",
          "type": "example"
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        {
          "ref": "1987, Brian Carter, Jack",
          "text": "This is brass monkey weather and it'll get worse.",
          "type": "quotation"
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        {
          "ref": "1997, Maeve Haran, A family affair",
          "text": "I forgot it'd be brass monkey weather in good old London.",
          "type": "quotation"
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          "ref": "2005, John G. Watson, The Golden Ball, page 115",
          "text": "Had to milk cows besides, and them winters up there in Wisconsin is brass monkey cold.",
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          "extra": "cocktail",
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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-04-26 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-04-21 using wiktextract (93a6c53 and 21a9316). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.