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Glite Dictionary
⚓ A cannonball stand 🥶 Very cold
brass monkey

brass monkey

9.9
A metal stand used on old ships to hold cannon balls
  • noun
  • Archaic
translation icon : soporte de cañones
  • The sailors stacked the cannonballs neatly on the brass monkey before setting sail.

Examples

  • Many sailors used a brass monkey to store cannon balls.

  • Historians debate whether the brass monkey was ever actually used on ships.

  • According to legend, cannonballs would roll off the brass monkey in extreme cold.

  • The old ship had a brass monkey on the deck.

  • The sailors stacked the cannonballs neatly on the brass monkey before setting sail.

  • According to legend, cannonballs would roll off the brass monkey in extreme cold.

  • Historians debate whether the brass monkey was ever actually used on ships.

Surface Forms

brass monkey singular
brass monkeys plural

Morphology

brass + monkey

The meaning 'extremely cold' is not predictably built from the literal constituents 'brass' (a metal) and 'monkey' (an animal); there is no transparent compositional link that would lead a B1 learner to infer cold weather. The phrase is idiomatic with obscure historical origins and is not a cross-linguistically obvious construction, so its meaning must be learned as a whole.

Etymology

Brass monkey originally named a small metal stand that sailors used to stack cannonballs on ships. People called the stand a brass monkey because it looked like a little figure, so the name came to mean that metal holder.