Water occupies a striking place in English figurative language, recurring across idioms that encode danger, adaptability, hidden meaning, purity, and emotion. Grounded in the linguoculturological framework of Teliya, Maslova, and Vorobyov, this article treats phraseological units not as isolated curiosities but as compressed "texts of culture" carrying collective historical memory. Drawing on idiom dictionaries and comparative corpus-based scholarship, the study classifies a representative set of English water idioms — in hot water, still waters run deep, to go with the flow, water under the bridge, among others — into coherent semantic fields and traces their motivation to England's maritime and seafaring history. The analysis shows that English water phraseology is organized largely around the sea as both peril and opportunity, while certain images, such as depth signifying hidden meaning, reflect more universal, embodied cognition. Implications for translation and language teaching are discussed.
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Shakhnoza Abdurazoq qizi Rakhmatullaeva (2026) studied this question.
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