Idioms: Body Parts
Body parts idioms is the B1 figurative-language collection built on anatomical metaphors. Pull someone’s leg (joke), cost an arm and a leg (very expensive), put your foot in your mouth (say something embarrassing), give someone a hand (help), keep an eye on (watch), off the top of my head (without thinking carefully), head over heels (deeply in love), bite your tongue (stay silent). Learners build the body-idiom range that natural conversational English uses constantly.
This worksheet builds B1 fluency with body-parts idioms.
Worksheet preview
What’s inside:
- An idiom bank with 20 high-frequency body-parts expressions
- Matching task: pair idiom with meaning
- Gap-fill in conversational contexts
- Production task: write a dialogue using at least three body-parts idioms
- Full Answer Key plus Teacher Notes
Common challenges: Body-idiom transparency varies — give someone a hand (semi-transparent: hand = help) vs pull someone’s leg (fully opaque). Some have L1 equivalents that look similar but mean different things. Register: body-parts idioms are casual; using them in formal writing sounds odd.
For: Adult and teenage learners (14+) at CEFR B1, in intermediate classes, 1:1 lessons, or self-study. Maps onto Cambridge B1 Preliminary (PET) and B2 First (FCE) Reading-Use of English. Part of the Body & Emotions Idioms collection — the natural next step is Idioms: Feelings and Emotions.
