cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey
Meanings
adj
- Extremely cold.
Pronunciation
Word forms
Etymology
Unknown. There is a discredited theory that it refers to a brass container for cannon balls on a British man-of-war, and a somewhat more plausible theory that "brass monkey" used to refer to a cannon on a man-of-war.
Related words
This entry uses open data from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA/GFDL). Word forms are used for search and are not indexed as separate pages.