Author Robert Hendrickson traces the sometimes bizarre, always fascinating origins and development of more than 9,000 words and phrases from A to Zzz, including slang, proverbs, animal and plant names, place-names, nicknames, historical expressions, foreign-language expressions, and phrases from literature. This greatly expanded and revised version of the critically acclaimed 1987 original contains more than 2,000 new entries. Comprehensive, authoritative, and eminently readable, The Facts On File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins will delight the logophile and serve as an invaluable reference tool for all students of language and literature.