Word.ws English Dictionary

all mouth and no trousers

all mouth and no trousers is the alternative form of all mouth and trousers.

Meaning of all mouth and trousers

Adjective

all mouth and trousers (not comparable)

  1. (UK, idiomatic) Superficial, engaging in empty, boastful talk, but not of real substance.

Origin of all mouth and no trousers

A possible corruption of all mouth and trousers, but consistent with phrases of the form all hat and no cattle and all bark and no bite. The implication of this phrase is that the person boasts, but is a laughing stock.

Questions about all mouth and no trousers

What is all mouth and no trousers the alternative form of?
All mouth and no trousers is the alternative form of all mouth and trousers.

Words near all mouth and no trousers in the dictionary

  1. all kinds of
  2. all lives matter
  3. all manner of
  4. all mops and brooms
  5. all motion and no meat
  6. all mouth and no trousers
  7. all mouth and trousers
  8. all my eye
  9. all my eye and Betty Martin
  10. all night
  11. all nighter

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: all mouth and no trousers (page history and authors); all mouth and trousers (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-all mouth and no trousers.ogg.

Cite this entry: “all mouth and no trousers.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/all_mouth_and_no_trousers. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.