A bluntly humorous British insult describing someone as extremely ugly. Spanners (wrenches) are hard, angular, metallic tools that when jumbled in a bag make an irregular, clunking, unappealing mess — an unflattering comparison to a face. The expression is vivid, deliberately over-the-top, and typically delivered with dark wit rather than genuine cruelty. It belongs to a British tradition of colourful insult similes (face like a slapped arse, face like a bulldog chewing a wasp). Mostly informal and usually not said to someone's face.
She said he had a face like a bag of spanners, but that his personality more than made up for it.
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(UK, informal, humorous) A very ugly face.
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Regional slang from around the English-speaking world — British, Australian, Irish, Caribbean, Nigerian, Filipino, AAVE, and the hyphenated-English dialects that make the internet sound local.
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