Type a keyword or pick a theme to instantly search 120+ common English idioms. Each entry shows the plain-English meaning, an example sentence, the theme, and how formal it is — built for ESL learners.
An idiom is a fixed phrase whose meaning cannot be guessed from its individual words — "kick the bucket" has nothing to do with buckets; it means to die. That non-literal quality is exactly what makes idioms hard for English learners and what this tool is designed to untangle.
The dictionary holds a curated dataset of 120+ high-frequency idioms, each tagged with a theme (money, time, emotion, success, communication, and more) and a formality level. The search runs entirely in your browser with no network calls. When you type, the matcher lowercases your query and scans three fields of every entry — the phrase itself, its meaning, and its example sentence — keeping any idiom where the query appears as a substring in any field. The theme and formality menus then apply as AND filters: an entry survives only if it matches the keyword and the chosen theme and the chosen formality. Results re-render on every keystroke via an input event listener, so the list is always live.
Matches are ranked simply: idioms whose phrase contains your keyword sort above those that only match in the meaning or example, so the most relevant headwords rise to the top. A live counter reports how many of the total entries currently match. Because everything is client-side, the tool works offline and never sends your searches anywhere. Use it to confirm a meaning you half-remember, to find idioms on a topic for a writing task, or to filter to neutral-register expressions that are safe in formal essays and emails.