Dictionaries › French

reprendre du poil de la bête

Pronunciation: /ʁə.pʁɑ̃.dʁə dy pwal də la bɛt/

“reprendre du poil de la bête” is a French word. Its 2 meanings in English:

verb

  1. to take a hair of the dog that bit one (to take an alcoholic drink the morning after to try and cure a hangover)
  2. to get a second wind, to get better, to regain one's strength, to get back on one's feet, to bounce back

In French

  1. Reprendre des forces, du courage.

Etymology

Literally, “to take back the hair of the beast”. From the popular belief that application of the hair of an animal that has bit the applicator will heal the animal bite. Semantic shift from "to do X" to "to experience the result of doing X".

Keep exploring: in the interactive dictionary every word of a definition is a link. Open “reprendre du poil de la bête” there

More French words

About this dictionary

The French dictionary on Glottosphere has 298,912 entries with a page. Browse the French dictionary.

Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence. Definitions in French are from the French Wiktionary, under the same licence.