Up to now, there have been a host of studies on idioms in language conducted by researchers worldwide. It could be said that Hockett (1958) was one of the pioneers who initially studied idiomatic forms. He defined an idiom as “a modern linguistic agreement on one composed of two or more constituent parts generally deemed to be words” (Hockett, 1958, p. 92). He argued that “the closer the wording of an idiom reflects a real-world situation, the easier it is to interpret” (Hockett, 1958, p. 92).

In his book Problems in the Analysis of Idioms, Weinreich (1969) defined an idiom as “a complex expression whose meaning cannot be derived from the meanings of its elements” (Weinreich, 1969, p. 26) and approached idioms from a generative perspective. In addition, Wright (2002) stated that an expression is identified as an idiom when it cannot be freely created by anyone but is instead fixed and recognized by native speakers; another feature is that it is understood in a non-literal way (Wright, 2002, p. 7).

In their book A Survey of Modern English, Gramley and Pätzold (2004) defined an idiom as “a complex lexical item which is longer than a word form but shorter than a sentence and which has a meaning that cannot be derived from the knowledge of its component parts” (Gramley & Pätzold, 2004, p. 128). They argued that the words forming an idiom neither function as separate lexical units nor make an isolable contribution to the overall meaning. According to them, the specific combination of words in an idiom conveys a unitary meaning.

Langlotz (2006) described idioms as “conventional multi-word units that are semantically opaque and structurally fixed” (Langlotz, 2006, p. 2). From his point of view, the structure of idioms can be considered “complex symbols with specific formal, semantic, pragmatic, and sociolinguistic characteristics” (Langlotz, 2006, p. 3).

Last but not least, Baker (1992) viewed idioms as “frozen patterns of language which allow little or no variation in form and often carry meanings which cannot be deduced from their individual components” (Baker, 1992, p. 67). In other words, an idiom can be considered a fixed group of words that has a special meaning different from the meanings of the individual words.

In conclusion, there are several definitions of idioms proposed by different linguists around the world from various perspectives. Personally, I consider Baker’s (1992) definition — viewing idioms as a subset of fixed expressions whose meanings are not derived from the combination of their separate words — to be the most justified in illustrating their essence and linguistic value.

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