pea soup
1
7.0
- noun
- Archaic
:
niebla espesa
- Kind of a nasty pea soup green?
You might have thought that TB had been eradicated in the UK alongside pea soup fogs and top hats.
- You might have thought that TB had been eradicated in the UK alongside pea soup fogs and top hats.
Examples
-
I may be black and white, but I'm afraid that by your own words, you are a blind man wandering aimlessly through a pea soup fog.
Blog text (28) -
It is the exact color of Ma's pea soup.
Fiction book (1990) -
If you started chanting in tongues and spewing pea soup, I might have to get rough.
Fiction book (1994) -
You might have thought that TB had been eradicated in the UK alongside pea soup fogs and top hats.
-
The city was shrouded in a pea soup that made it hard to see anything.
-
Driving through the pea soup was challenging due to the low visibility.
-
We experienced a frightening pea soup during our evening walk downtown.
Synonyms
2
1.3
A heavy cloud near the ground that makes it hard to see far
A thick yellow fog caused by smoke and damp air
Antonyms
How Thick
Surface Forms
Morphology
pea + soup
The sense 'a thick, yellowish fog' is a figurative comparison to the consistency and color of pea soup, not a literal combination of the nouns 'pea' and 'soup'. A B1 learner who knows the words would most likely interpret it as a food item and would not reliably infer the meteorological meaning without prior exposure, so the expression is idiomatic rather than transparently compositional.
Etymology
The informal meaning of pea soup comes from the look of old city fog. People said the fog was so thick and yellow-green that it looked like a bowl of pea soup, so the phrase came to mean 'heavy fog'.