Gary Martin

I am the author of the Phrasefinder website, which was founded in 1995.

The site grew out of a lifelong enjoyment of puns and wordplay and of computer programming. I wrote my first computer program in 1958, at a time when I would have been listening to Beyond Our Ken and the Goon Show on the radio. These interests were brought together in postgraduate studies in machine intelligence in 1985 and later on the Writer's Workbench computational linguistics research project at Sheffield Hallam University.

The website includes:

• A large list of phrases with their origins explained.
• A large list of colloquial idioms, with their meaning and example usage.
• The Phrase Thesaurus, which is a writer's utility providing lists of phrases related to any input search word.

I also administer a Facebook group about phrases, sayings and proverbs.