Dictionary of American Idioms (Russian e-text)

[Benjamin Zimmer]

I recently came across a Russian e-text site <http://lib.ru/>.  There are
some English texts on the site, mostly public-domain material, but one
text is notable: _A Dictionary of American Idioms_ by Adam Makkai et al.
The preface is in Russian, but the main text of the dictionary is all in
English (scanned and OCR'd):

Contents:
http://lib.ru/ENGLISH/american_idioms.txt_Contents
Full text (almost 2 megs):
http://lib.ru/ENGLISH/american_idioms.txt

Looks like some serious copyright infringement, and Google finds the same
text on more than a dozen mirror sites.  In any case, the selection of
idioms is rather interesting (more than 8,000 are listed) -- everything
from "Indian sign" to "drive like Jehu".


--Ben Zimmer