cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.53 in modern English
82
Scrabble Score
41
Letters
7
Syllables
19
Unique Chars
Meaning
Example Sentences
- "It was a bitterly cold, snowy and wind-blown evening in early January when I told my son that it was, "Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey." Needless to say, he laughed and agreed with me."
- "There were a few kids there already, and had a fire going on shore, some were huddled around the fire. I couldn't bame them, it was cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey."
- "I know this was during coon hunting season so it must have been sometime in December. It was cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey."
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.