Idioms with metals As components in Croatian, Russian and German

Abstract: The subject of this paper are Croatian, Russian and German idioms with the component that belong to the group of metals. It is a well-known fact that most of the chemical elements are metals of one variety or another, as well as that metals are one of the most commonly used materials by human civilization throughout the whole history. The paper aims to analyze the most productive and the most frequent idioms that contain one of the metals as a phraseologi-cal component: iron, lead, quicksilver, gold, silver and to investigate to which extent national characteristics are embodied in these idioms. Furthermore, the paper looks at whether they match and how they differ from each other, i.e. whether they are semantic phraseological equivalents or not. In the centre of the triangle is Croatian that together with Russian belongs to the group of Slavic languages, while German belongs to the group of Germanic languages.