This article explores the meaning of Egyptian idioms concerning parts of the human body. It uses the theoretical perspective of cognitive semantics and tests the cognitive linguistic hypothesis that idiomatic expressions are motivated by conceptual mechanisms of the native speakers of a language .These mechanisms are conceptual metaphors, conceptual metonymies, and conventional knowledge of the speakers of a language.
The study also explores how far our conceptual system results from the kind of beings we are and the way we interrelate with our physical and cultural environments. These figurative meanings were classified and then translated, both literally and figuratively, into English. Using the Conceptual Theory of Metaphor and Metonymy, developed mainly by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980), Lakoff (1987), and Kövecses (2002), the analysis demonstrates that: Egyptian Arabic speakers' conceptual system is metaphorical; that there are four main cognitive mechanisms used as motivators for the meanings of these idioms; that the overall idiomatic meaning of these EA body-part idioms is motivated through one or more of these strategies and is never arbitrary; and that some of EA body-part idioms are culture-specific.