Kennen Sie schon … „The Phrase Finder“?

„The Phrasefind­er site was found­ed in 1997 by Gary Mar­tin, who writes the Mean­ings and Ori­gins sec­tion of the site and the Phrase A Week posts. It grew out of post-grad­u­ate research into com­pu­ta­tion­al lin­guis­tics that was devel­oped in 1985 in a Sheffield Hal­lam Uni­ver­si­ty research project into the use of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence tech­niques to aid the teach­ing of writ­ing.

The site ini­tial­ly host­ed a search­able data­base of phras­es and idioms called The Phrase The­saurus, which uses arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence meth­ods to enhance search results.

In 1998 a list­ing of the mean­ings and ori­gins of phras­es was added. That list of idioms and phras­es now con­tains the ori­gins of more than 2,100 entries – mak­ing it the largest such pub­lic ref­er­ence on the Inter­net.

Late in 1998 a dis­cus­sion forum was added to the site, where any­one could ask ques­tions on the mean­ing or ori­gin of phras­es and say­ings in Eng­lish. It con­tains an archive of 70,000 ques­tions and answers about phrase ori­gins and their mean­ings. The major­i­ty of the post­ed replies have been con­tributed by a hard-work­ing and exceed­ing­ly per­sis­tent group of unpaid enthu­si­asts, some of whom began con­tribut­ing dai­ly in ear­ly 1999.
The forum is now closed to new queries but remains online as a ref­er­ence archive.“