11,000+ American Idioms



The Exhaustive List of American Idioms (11,000+ idioms)

(The current total is 11,377)

Idiom Books Preview

This is probably the largest list of American idioms in the world.

All 10 eBooks of idioms are downloaded at one time in a single zip file.

Choose the format that you want (ePub or PDF).

I suggest that you use the ePub format. It is considered to be the most versatile for eBooks.

Important: Be sure to look at the section on apps (found in the "Tools" tab above). Click here

Look for an app that can bookmark your location. This is very important when there are 11,000+ idioms.



Be sure to look at the Home Page for more important information about idioms.

AMERICAN IDIOMS BOOKS

My Experience With ESL And Idioms

My wife and I went to China for 10 years to help the Chinese people. One of the things that I did was teach English to university students.

Before that, I helped teach ESL in America for a couple years.

I learned many important things about teaching and learning foreign languages.

As a result, I decided to create this website to help others for free.

This website will help both the ESL teachers and ESL students.

ESL teaching experience
AMERICAN IDIOMS BOOKS

The Reason I Collected These Idioms

Idiom collection

I quickly discovered in China that idioms are almost a separate language, by themselves.

Many of my students already had a firm grasp on the English language and could communicate very well when normal literal words were used.

Unfortunately, idioms are not literal, and the American language has over 11,000+ idiomatic phrases.

After I realized that idioms are so important in American communication, I started collecting them.

For 10 years, I collected idioms from TV shows, movies, and conversations.

I then put the idioms in a multiple-choice format to make them more interesting to study.

Plus, this approach forces our minds to process them better.

Since the list of idioms is so large, I needed to spread the list out over 10 books.

There are about 500 pages of idioms per book, depending on which Kindle format you use.

Idiom books collection
AMERICAN IDIOMS BOOKS

What Are Idioms?

Common idioms

An idiom is a phrase that has a meaning you would not be able to understand from the literal meaning of the individual words.

For example, the following phrase is obviously an idiom: "It is raining cats and dogs."

Although some phrases are obviously idioms, other phrases do not look like idioms at first glance.

Consider these examples:

• Let it play out
• Off to a bad start
• Open door policy
• Onward and upward
• Let that sink in
• Open secret
• Next to nothing
• Let things slide

Think of the literal meaning of the individual words in the above phrases.

Idiom examples
Literal thinking

For example, "Let it play out."

The second language learner might ask: "Why is it playing?" "Where is the 'out'? Is it moving outdoors?"

Remember, second language learners normally view words as literal. Even when they are told not to do this, they still do.

Native English speakers do not usually think of these types of phrases as idioms because we have heard them so many times; their meanings have become obvious.

In our minds, they are a normal part of the English language.

If you are a native English speaker, you will probably look at some of my idioms and say: "These phrases are not idioms. Why did he include these phrases?"

Native perspective
ESL experience

Yet most second language learners would not understand most of these phrases.

I taught ESL for two years before I went to China, and I taught English to Chinese university students for 10 years.

As a result, I have a firm understanding of what second language learners understand and do not understand.

AMERICAN IDIOMS BOOKS

Change The Way You Think About Idioms

A major reason why students have difficulties learning idioms is because their minds are set to view words as having literal meanings. This must change if the student wants to master idioms. This is step 1 in learning idioms.

Step 2 in learning idioms is to expose yourself to a large variety of idioms. It seems that being exposed to a large variety of idioms reprograms our brain to help us understand unknown idioms.

This is what happens to native English speakers. That is the reason that we can understand many idioms even though we have never heard them before. These 10 books cover an extremely large variety of idioms.

You do not need to memorize these idioms to reprogram your brain to understand American idioms. First, read through them without trying to memorize them. Later, memorize the ones you think are important.

Idiom books collage
AMERICAN IDIOMS BOOKS

Using Context To Help You Understand Idioms

Context example

Although some idioms make no logical sense, many of them can be figured out.

As I said before, that is the reason why native English speakers can understand idioms that they have never heard before.

Let us pretend that a man is talking in a loud or aggressive manner.

Then, someone says, "Hey, take it down a peg, or two."

So, let us use context to figure out the meaning of the idiom.

We know that the person is angry and that it would be wise for him to calm down.

Idiom analysis
Word meaning

We know that pegs can go up or down.

We know that "up" usually means higher or more.

We also know that "down" usually means lower or less.

Therefore, we can probably deduce the intended meaning.

We can deduce that the person is asking the angry person to calm down.

This can be done for most idioms.

Do not think of idioms as being literal.

Instead, think of the context of the situation.

Look at the words being used and think of alternate uses for those words.

After doing this for a while, your mind will start doing this automatically.

This is the reason why reading through the whole list of my idioms is beneficial.

After a while, you will see how we often use alternative meanings of words in our idioms.

Contextual learning

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