brass monkey
- idiom
- /bræs ˈmʌnki/
- Informal
:
hace un frío que pela
- It was a brass monkey morning, and the car wouldn’t start.
Examples
-
You need a thick coat for this brass monkey weather.
-
The temperature outside is brass monkey cold tonight.
-
It's so cold outside, it's a real brass monkey today!
-
I can't believe how brass monkey it is this morning.
-
The temperature outside is brass monkey cold tonight.
-
You need a thick coat for this brass monkey weather.
-
It's so cold outside, it's a real brass monkey today!
Synonyms
14
4.5
Very cold, like the weather near the North Pole
1
6.8
Very cold, often with a strong wind
1
9.9
People say this to mean very cold in a joking, exaggerated way
1
9.9
Very cold in a way that feels unpleasant
Feeling quite cold, often said about the weather
Antonyms
How Cold
Surface Forms
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 as a phrase for very cold weather may come from a popular story about that metal stand on ships. People said that in very cold weather the metal would shrink and the cannonballs would fall off the brass monkey, so the phrase came to mean 'extremely cold'.