like a bag of spanners
- idiom
- Offensive
:
feísimo
- She made a funny face in the mirror, and it looked like a bag of spanners.
Examples
-
Well, I am here with some tips and tricks to sort your face out so it doesn't look like a bag of spanners.
Blog text (1) -
After he got out of bed, his hair looked like a bag of spanners.
-
Despite his attempts to style it, his outfit made him look like a bag of spanners.
Synonyms
3
9.9
Very ugly in an informal, rude way
2
7.2
Very unpleasant to look at or to be with
1
2.0
A person or thing that is not pleasant to look at
1
9.9
To call someone ugly as a joke
1
9.9
A joking way to say that someone looks very ugly
A face that looks very ugly
A face that people think is very ugly
Something that looks very ugly and unpleasant
Ugly or unpleasant in appearance
A person or thing that looks very ugly, said as a joke
Antonyms
How Ugly
Surface Forms
Morphology
like + a + bag + of + spanners
The meaning 'very unattractive or comical in appearance' cannot be derived from the literal words 'bag' (a container) and 'spanners' (wrenches); the image of a container of tools does not transparently map onto someone's looks. This is a dialectal British simile with an idiomatic, culture-specific derogatory sense, so even learners who know the constituent words would not reliably infer the intended meaning.
Etymology
Like a bag of spanners comes from the picture of a bag full of spanners, a pile of metal tools all jumbled and knocked together into a bent, messy heap. So, when someone's face looks twisted, bruised or oddly messy, people say they look like a bag of spanners, meaning 'very unattractive' or 'funny looking'.