When someone says: “I’m going to hit the sack.”, it doesn’t mean that they will literally go find a sack and hit it. It means that person is going to sleep. The English language is littered with this type of figure of speech. “I’m going to hit the sack” is an idiom.
What is an idiom?
An idiom is an expression that cannot be understood from the meanings of its separate words. That expression has a separate meaning of its own.
Where do idioms come from?
Idioms come from our history, culture and customs. Every language uses idioms and you’ll find many languages have equivalent idioms, while there are more that are different. The English language alone has approximately 25,000 idioms.
The idiom, “a piece of cake” as in “Don’t worry about the math test. It’ll be a piece of cake.” means that something is going to be easy. In this case the easy task is the math test - apparently.
This idiom originates from the 1930s. American poet Ogden Nash was quoted as happily saying: “Life’s a piece of cake.” What’s easier than eating a piece of cake? Not much.
For practice, we’ve created this list of the 100 most frequently used idioms.
Grade 3 idioms worksheets
For additional practice, your kids might want to try their hand at these idioms definitions worksheets.
