25 Common Sayings And Where They Came From
Language is a living, breathing thing — and nowhere is that more obvious than in the idioms and expressions we toss around every day without a second thought. You tell someone to “bite the bullet,” warn them they’ve gone “beyond the pale,” or reassure them you’ll get it done “by hook or by crook,” never stopping to wonder where on earth those phrases actually came from. The answers, it turns out, are far more interesting than you might expect.
Behind these 25 common sayings and where they came from lies a hidden history of battlefield surgeries, medieval peasant laws, mercury-poisoned hat makers, and even ancient Indian religious rituals. Some origins are darkly fascinating. Others are surprisingly practical. A few will make you completely rethink the way you speak. Every one of them tells a story about the world as it once was — and how echoes of that world still live on in your conversations today.
Whether you’re a language lover, a history buff, or just someone who got curious after using one of these phrases, this deep dive into everyday English will leave you with a richer appreciation for the words you use without thinking. Let’s get into it.
The Sayings and Their Stories
1. Bite the Bullet
What it means: To endure a painful or difficult situation with courage and stoicism.
Its surprising origin: Before the development of modern anesthesia, battlefield surgeons had almost nothing to offer soldiers during agonizing medical procedures — amputations, bullet extractions, wound cauterizations. The best they could do was hand the patient something to clench between their teeth to manage the pain without screaming. A lead bullet, firm enough to bear down on without breaking, served that purpose.
The phrase gained wide literary use in the 19th century, with Rudyard Kipling using it in his 1891 novel The Light of the Failed. Today, it’s one of those common sayings that perfectly captures its origin — steeling yourself against something that’s going to hurt.
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2. Mad as a Hatter
What it means: Completely crazy or irrational.
Its surprising origin: This isn’t just a Lewis Carroll invention. Long before the Mad Hatter showed up in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), felt hat makers throughout the 18th and 19th centuries were genuinely going mad — and for a very specific reason. Mercury nitrate was widely used in the felt-curing process, and workers who spent their days in poorly ventilated workshops inhaled mercury vapors day after day.
Chronic mercury poisoning produces a chilling range of neurological symptoms: uncontrollable tremors, slurred speech, memory loss, and severe mood instability. The visible suffering of hat workers was so common that “mad as a hatter” became a fixture of the language long before Carroll immortalized it in fiction.
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3. Baker’s Dozen
What it means: A group of 13, rather than the standard 12.
Its surprising origin: Medieval England took the quality of bread extremely seriously — seriously enough to pass the Assize of Bread and Ale around 1266, one of the earliest consumer protection laws in English history. This law set strict standards for the weight and price of bread, and bakers caught selling underweight loaves faced severe penalties, including fines and public humiliation.
To protect themselves, bakers began adding a 13th loaf to every dozen they sold, essentially building in a safety margin. If one loaf turned out slightly lighter, the extra covered the shortfall. That cautious habit embedded itself in the language and gave us a term still used casually today.
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4. Turn a Blind Eye
What it means: To deliberately ignore something you know is happening.
Its surprising origin: This one has a concrete historical moment attached to it. During the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801, British Admiral Horatio Nelson received a signal from his superior officer, Admiral Sir Hyde Parker, ordering him to withdraw from the engagement. Nelson, confident in his position and unwilling to retreat, raised his telescope to his blind eye — he had lost sight in his right eye years earlier — and declared that he could not see any signal to stop.
He continued the attack and won decisively. Whether the story is perfectly accurate in every detail is debated by some historians, but Nelson himself reportedly acknowledged the maneuver with some amusement. The phrase has carried his brazen act of deliberate ignorance ever since.
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5. Caught Red-Handed
What it means: Discovered in the act of doing something wrong.
Its surprising origin: This phrase traces back to Scottish law — specifically, to early statutes concerning the theft and slaughter of animals. Under these laws, a person could only be convicted of the crime if they were caught with the blood of the slaughtered animal still on their hands. No blood, no ironclad case. The phrase appears in Scottish legal records as early as the 15th century and later shows up in Sir Walter Scott’s 1819 novel Ivanhoe.
The beauty of the phrase is in its literalness: the evidence was written on the body. Today it’s used for any situation where someone is caught in the act, no blood required.
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6. Beyond the Pale
What it means: Outside the bounds of acceptable behavior.
Its surprising origin: “The Pale” was a real place — specifically, the area of Ireland under firm English control during the medieval and early modern periods, roughly centered around Dublin and fortified with ditches and fences. “Pale” comes from the Latin palus, meaning stake or boundary marker. Anything that happened beyond that boundary was considered wild, uncivilized, and outside the protection of English law.
The phrase entered the English language as a way of describing behavior that fell outside the boundaries of what was socially acceptable, and it stuck. If someone’s conduct today is “beyond the pale,” they’ve crossed a line — much like venturing outside those old Dublin fortifications.
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7. Bury the Hatchet
What it means: To end a conflict and make peace.
Its surprising origin: This phrase has genuine roots in Native American peacemaking traditions. When rival tribes agreed to end hostilities, the act was often formalized by literally burying weapons — tomahawks, hatchets, war clubs — in the ground. The physical act symbolized the laying down of aggression. Colonial-era accounts of treaties between European settlers and Indigenous nations frequently referenced this custom.
The first recorded use in English appears around the late 17th century. Today, when you bury the hatchet with a coworker or a family member, you’re participating in a tradition with deep Indigenous American ceremonial roots.
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8. Break the Ice
What it means: To do or say something to relieve tension or awkwardness in a social situation.
Its surprising origin: Before engines and icebreakers, frozen waterways in winter could cut off trade and communication entirely. Smaller vessels, called “ice boats,” were specifically sent ahead of larger trading ships to physically break through the ice and clear a path. This was painstaking, literal work — clearing the way so that commerce could flow again.
The metaphorical leap to social situations is elegant. Just as breaking the ice cleared the way for ships to move, a well-timed joke or friendly question clears the way for conversation to flow. The phrase had entered common English usage by the 17th century.
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9. Show Your True Colors
What it means: To reveal your real character or intentions, usually after concealing them.
Its surprising origin: Naval warfare in the age of sail was as much about deception as firepower. Ships routinely flew false flags — the colors (flags) of a neutral or even friendly nation — to get close to an enemy vessel without being fired upon. Once within effective range, the ship would run up its real flag before attacking. This tactic, while considered somewhat dishonorable, was technically legal as long as the true colors were shown before the actual engagement.
The practice gave English speakers a powerful metaphor for the moment someone drops their pretense and shows who they really are.
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10. By Hook or by Crook
What it means: By any means necessary, whatever it takes.
Its surprising origin: This phrase takes us back to medieval English feudal law. Peasants were generally forbidden from cutting down trees in forests belonging to lords, but many were granted a specific right: they could collect fallen branches and deadwood, provided they gathered it using only a shepherd’s crook or a reaper’s billhook. They couldn’t chop or cut — only pull down what could be reached with these specific tools.
It was a narrow, grudging right, but it was a right. People would do whatever they could within those two tools — by hook or by crook — to gather enough fuel for the winter.
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11. Eat Humble Pie
What it means: To admit a mistake and accept humiliation or a lowered status.
Its surprising origin: After a successful deer hunt in medieval England, the lord and his guests would feast on the finest cuts of venison. His servants and lower-status workers, however, received a pie made from the “umbles” — the offal and entrails of the deer, including the heart, liver, and kidneys. To eat “umble pie” was literally to eat the inferior meal and accept your subordinate place in the social hierarchy.
Over time, “umble” was reinterpreted as “humble” — a mishearing that actually made the phrase richer in meaning, since humility and subservience are exactly what the meal represented.
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12. Blood is Thicker Than Water
What it means: Family ties are stronger than any other relationship.
Its surprising origin: Here’s one with a fascinating twist. The phrase as most people use it — implying that family loyalty trumps all — is actually the reverse of its original meaning. Scholars of medieval German literature point to the fuller original proverb: “The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.” In this version, “blood” refers to blood shed together in battle or sworn oaths between warriors — chosen bonds — while “water of the womb” refers to biological family.
The original meaning was that the bonds you choose and earn can be stronger than the ones you’re born into. Somewhere along the way, the saying got flipped entirely.
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13. Hands Down
What it means: Easily and without effort; without question.
Its surprising origin: Horse racing gave us this one. When a jockey has such a commanding lead in a race that victory is assured, there’s no need to urge the horse with the whip or maintain a tight grip on the reins. The jockey can literally drop their hands — a visible signal of total confidence — and still cross the finish line first.
The phrase entered everyday English in the 19th century and has since been used to mean anything accomplished easily or decisively. Winning hands down means you barely had to try.
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14. A Nest Egg
What it means: Money saved for the future, typically for retirement.
Its surprising origin: Farmers used a practical trick to encourage hens to keep laying eggs: they would leave one egg in the nest — sometimes a real one, sometimes a ceramic decoy — to signal that this was a productive and safe spot to continue laying. The presence of that single egg prompted the hen to add more.
The metaphor transferred neatly to personal finance. Just as the nest egg prompts more eggs, a savings reserve encourages continued saving and financial growth. It’s a remarkably intuitive origin for a concept that’s just as relevant today as it was on any 17th-century farm.
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15. Crocodile Tears
What it means: Fake or insincere expressions of sadness or remorse.
Its surprising origin: Ancient and medieval writers, including the Greek author Photius in the 9th century, perpetuated the belief that crocodiles wept while consuming their victims — a display of apparent grief that was entirely false. This became a powerful symbol of hypocrisy and false sorrow. Shakespeare used it multiple times across his plays.
Interestingly, crocodiles do produce something that looks like tears while eating, but it has nothing to do with emotion. It’s a physiological response — a side effect of the hissing and huffing involved in eating that forces fluid through the lacrimal glands. The ancients weren’t entirely wrong about the tears. They were wrong about the crocodiles feeling anything.
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16. A Pinch of Salt / With a Grain of Salt
What it means: To view something with skepticism; to not take it entirely at face value.
Its surprising origin: The Roman scholar Pliny the Elder described, in his encyclopedic work Naturalis Historia (77 AD), a recipe for an antidote against poison — and one of the ingredients was a single grain of salt. The idea was that consuming a tiny amount of salt alongside something dangerous would neutralize the threat. To “take something with a grain of salt,” then, was to treat it as potentially harmful and approach it with caution.
The phrase survives intact more than 2,000 years later, still meaning much the same thing: don’t swallow everything you’re told.
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17. Barking Up the Wrong Tree
What it means: Pursuing a mistaken course of action or directing effort at the wrong target.
Its surprising origin: This phrase comes directly from American frontier hunting practices, particularly raccoon and squirrel hunting with dogs. Hunting dogs were trained to chase prey up into trees and then bark at the base to alert the hunter. But in the dark, or through dense forest, a dog could easily lose track of which tree the animal had climbed — and bark at the wrong one entirely.
James Hall used the phrase in print as early as 1833 in his book Legends of the West, suggesting it was already common enough to need no explanation. It remains one of the most intuitive idioms in the English language.
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18. Butter Someone Up
What it means: To flatter someone excessively, usually to gain something in return.
Its surprising origin: This one travels all the way to ancient India. In Hindu religious practice, devotees would shape balls of ghee (clarified butter) and throw them at statues of deities — specifically figures of Vishnu and other gods — as an act of prayer and supplication, hoping to earn divine favor and blessings. The act was literally about coating your god with butter in hopes of a favorable response.
The concept of using butter as a tool for gaining favor made its way into English, where it evolved into the more mundane (but recognizable) act of excessive flattery.
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19. A Red-Letter Day
What it means: A day of special significance or good fortune.
Its surprising origin: The origin of this one is visual and practical. Medieval church calendars marked holy days, feast days, and important religious observances in red ink — standing out against the black ink used for ordinary days. These were the days of celebration, rest, and religious significance: Christmas, Easter, saints’ feast days. The color itself communicated importance at a glance.
The tradition of red-letter days was so well established that the phrase passed into secular usage, now describing any personally meaningful or especially fortunate day — no church calendar required.
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20. Dead as a Doornail
What it means: Completely and unquestionably dead; entirely finished or defunct.
Its surprising origin: This phrase has a wonderfully literal explanation rooted in medieval carpentry. Doornails were large-headed nails hammered into a door, often decoratively or for reinforcement. The process involved “clinching” — driving the nail through the wood and then bending the protruding end over flat on the other side, permanently securing it. This clinching process destroyed the nail’s usefulness as a fastener; it could never be drawn out and reused.
A doornail was, in the most literal sense, beyond revival. Chaucer and Shakespeare both used the phrase, and Charles Dickens gave it one of its most famous appearances in the opening lines of A Christmas Carol (1843).
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21. Curry Favor
What it means: To try to gain approval or advantage through flattery or obsequious behavior.
Its surprising origin: This phrase is a fascinating corruption of an older French expression. The original was “conraier Fauvel” — meaning to groom a horse named Fauvel. Fauvel was a fallow-colored (yellowish-brown) horse who appeared in a 14th-century French allegorical poem, Roman de Fauvel, as a symbol of duplicity, vanity, and deceit. To groom Fauvel was to engage in corrupt flattery.
When the expression passed into English, “Fauvel” — unfamiliar to English ears — was replaced with “favor,” a word that made more intuitive sense in context. The meaning survived the mistranslation almost perfectly.
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22. Go the Whole Nine Yards
What it means: To do something completely, putting in maximum effort.
Its surprising origin: The etymological origin of this phrase is, genuinely, one of the most debated in the English language. Several theories compete: that it refers to the nine yards of fabric in a tailored suit, kilt, or sari; that it describes the capacity of a concrete mixer truck; or that it relates to the length of ammunition belts in World War II aircraft. None has been definitively proven.
What’s clear is that the phrase appears in print only from the 1960s onward, making WWII-era origins uncertain. The concrete mixer theory has some circumstantial support — mixer drums of around 9 cubic yards were common — but language historians continue to debate it. What’s not debated: when you go the whole nine yards, you hold nothing back.
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23. The Whole Shebang
What it means: The entire thing; everything involved in a particular situation.
Its surprising origin: “Shebang” is a word with murky but interesting roots. One strong candidate is the Irish word sibín (anglicized as “shebeen”), referring to an unlicensed establishment selling alcohol — a place where anything and everything unofficial might happen under one roof. Another theory links it to the French cabane or a variant chabang, meaning a hut or shelter.
Mark Twain used “shebang” in his writings in the 1860s to refer to a vehicle, a room, or any kind of establishment. Whatever its precise root, it came to mean a complete collection of things — every part of a whole — a meaning that’s remained stable ever since.
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24. A Sight for Sore Eyes
What it means: Someone or something that is very welcome, especially after a period of difficulty or absence.
Its surprising origin: Jonathan Swift, the satirist and author of Gulliver’s Travels, appears to have been among the first to use this expression in print, in his A Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation (1738). The phrase appeared in a form very close to its modern usage, suggesting it was already recognizable to readers of the time and likely in oral use before Swift recorded it.
The logic is direct: when your eyes are sore from strain or misery, the sight of something pleasant provides genuine physical and emotional relief. List25 fans will recognize this kind of “hidden history hiding in plain sight” as one of the most satisfying discoveries in etymology.
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25. Cat Got Your Tongue?
What it means: Asked of someone who is unexpectedly silent or unable to respond.
Its surprising origin: This phrase carries a few competing backstories, all darker than the gentle idiom suggests. One theory points to ancient punishments in which liars and blasphemers had their tongues cut out — and fed to cats, removing their ability to speak at all. Another links it to the “cat-o’-nine-tails,” the notorious naval whip whose lashes were so severe they could render a sailor speechless with shock.
A more benign explanation simply draws on the natural silence of cats — mysterious, self-contained, and rarely forthcoming. Whatever the true origin, the phrase has been in use since at least the mid-19th century, and it still does exactly what it promises: it calls out silence.
FAQ
Why do we still use sayings whose original meanings no longer apply?
Language is famously resistant to updating itself. Once a phrase enters common use, it tends to outlive the context that created it by centuries. The meaning becomes attached to the words themselves, not the original situation — so “bite the bullet” persists long after battlefield surgery without anesthesia has become history.
Are all these phrase origins definitively proven?
Not all of them. Some, like “Turn a Blind Eye” (Nelson) and “Mad as a Hatter” (mercury poisoning), are well-documented. Others, like “Go the Whole Nine Yards” and “The Whole Shebang,” remain genuinely debated among etymologists. Where debate exists, the article notes it.
What is the study of word and phrase origins called?
The study of the origin of words and phrases is called etymology. Scholars who specialize in it trace linguistic changes through historical texts, legal records, literature, and spoken language to piece together how words evolved over time.
Which of these sayings has the oldest origin?
“With a Grain of Salt” is arguably the oldest, tracing back to Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia written around 77 AD — making it roughly 2,000 years old and still in active use.
Have any of these sayings changed their meaning over time?
Yes — “Blood is Thicker Than Water” is the most striking example. Its original meaning (that chosen bonds are stronger than family) is essentially the opposite of how most people use it today (implying family loyalty is paramount).
Where can I find more fascinating lists like this?
Sites like List25 specialize in exactly this kind of engaging, fact-packed list content — covering history, language, science, and culture in formats that are easy to explore and genuinely hard to stop reading.
The Hidden History in Every Sentence
Language carries history the way rivers carry sediment — constantly moving forward, depositing traces of everything it has passed through. Every time you accuse someone of crocodile tears, warn them they’ve gone beyond the pale, or tell them to bury the hatchet, you’re channeling centuries of human experience: medieval laws, naval battles, ancient rituals, and the everyday struggles of people who lived in a world very different from ours.
The 25 common sayings and where they came from covered here represent just a fraction of the hidden histories embedded in everyday English. Behind nearly every idiom you’ve ever used is a story worth knowing — a war, a trade, a superstition, or a piece of practical wisdom that proved so useful it never went away.
The next time a phrase rolls off your tongue, take a moment to wonder how it got there. Chances are, the answer is far more interesting than you’d expect.