Word.ws English Dictionary

all mouth and trousers

all mouth and trousers adjective: superficial, engaging in empty, boastful talk, but not of real substance.

Adjective

all mouth and trousers (not comparable)

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

Synonyms of all mouth and trousers

Forms of all mouth and trousers

alternative formall mouth and no trousers

Origin of all mouth and trousers

From mouth, meaning "talk" rather than action, and trousers, presumably at the time of origin, a reference to masculinity, either as trousers as a male item of clothing, or a reference to the genitals.

Questions about all mouth and trousers

What does all mouth and trousers mean?
All mouth and trousers means superficial, engaging in empty, boastful talk, but not of real substance.
What part of speech is all mouth and trousers?
All mouth and trousers is an adjective.

Words near all mouth and trousers in the dictionary

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

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: 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.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-all mouth and trousers.ogg.

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