One of the key issues of recent linguistic trends is to understand the interface between language, culture and human body. The study of the figurative usage of body part and bodily fluid terms unveils cross-cultural specificities of how they are applied to various aspects of life. Anthropologist Victor Turner considers 'blood' a dominant ritual symbol, which highlights its abundant symbolism in Western and non-Western traditions. Employing a Cultural Linguistic framework, the research proposes the basic cultural conceptualizations of vér 'blood' in the Hungarian language, based on phrases that have been collected from various dictionaries and complemented by data extracted from the Hungarian National Corpus. According to the findings, the underlying conceptualizations include death/fight, kinship, human nature, life force, emotion and intensity, where expressions that convey the meaning of intensity derive from more than one conceptualization. It is further pointed out that numerous phrases are culturally constructed and related to cultural beliefs, events and rites such as blood-brotherhood (vérszerzodés 'blood-contract'), duels (elso vérig 'until first blood'), the Medieval theory of four humours (bovérd 'plentiful-blooded'), or the folk belief related to vampires (vérét szívja 'suck his blood').