Word.ws English Dictionary

brass monkeys

brass monkeys adjective: very cold. Also the plural of brass monkey.

Adjective

brass monkeys (not comparable)

  1. (Commonwealth, Ireland, UK, idiomatic, informal) Very cold.
    • Blimey, it's brass monkeys out there today.

Noun capitalized: Brass Monkeys

Brass Monkeys

  1. (plural) plural of Brass Monkey

Also used as

brass monkeys is also the plural of brass monkey.

Origin of brass monkeys

From the phrase cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey - supposedly a reference to the brass container for cannon balls on a British man-of-war (but this seems to have been discredited).

Questions about brass monkeys

What does brass monkeys mean?
Brass monkeys means very cold.
What part of speech is brass monkeys?
Brass monkeys can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near brass monkeys in the dictionary

  1. brass instruments
  2. brass it out
  3. brass knuckles
  4. brass leaf
  5. brass monkey
  6. brass monkeys
  7. brass nail
  8. brass nails
  9. brass neck
  10. brass necks
  11. brass off

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: brass monkeys (page history and authors); Brass Monkeys (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-brass monkeys.ogg.

Cite this entry: “brass monkeys.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/brass_monkeys. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.