Method
How Idiom Insider sources and dates every phrase — what “first recorded use” means, where our evidence comes from, and how we handle the many cases where the honest answer is “we don’t know.”
What we are trying to establish
For every phrase we ask one question first: what is the earliest use anyone can actually point to in a dated, written source? That date — the first attestation — is the spine of every entry. It is not the same as when a phrase was “invented,” which is usually unknowable; spoken language runs years or decades ahead of the page. It is simply the earliest moment we can prove the phrase existed, quoted from the record.
Everything else on an entry — the popular story, our verdict, the timeline — hangs off that evidence. Where the evidence is thin, we say so plainly rather than filling the gap with a tidy tale.
The sources we use
We work from the primary and reference sources that etymologists actually rely on, not from the recycled stories that dominate the web:
- The Oxford English Dictionary — for dated first citations and sense history.
- Historical corpora and newspaper archives — Google Books, digitised newspaper collections and similar, used to test and antedate claims.
- Green’s Dictionary of Slang — for informal and spoken usage.
- Specialist etymologists — the published work of scholars and researchers such as those behind Etymonline, Quote Investigator, and the late Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words, whose sourcing we check rather than take on trust.
Where a claim can only be traced to a modern retelling — a single popular book, a viral post, a chain email — we treat that as evidence of when the story started, not of where the phrase came from.
The verdict system
Every entry carries one verdict, applied consistently:
- Attested — the first recorded use is identified, with a source and a date.
- Partly true — the popular story contains a real element but is wrong in important respects.
- Unproven — an explanation is plausible but has no supporting record.
- Folk etymology — the popular origin is a later invention, and we show the evidence.
- Origin unknown — no reliable earliest source exists, and we say so.
Why “origin unknown” matters
The idiom internet is full of confident stories that are simply false, because a tidy explanation travels further than an honest “nobody knows.” We would rather publish the second. When the record genuinely runs out, an entry says origin unknown or unproven and explains what would be needed to settle it. That is not a gap in the work; it is the work.
Quotations and spelling
Historical quotations are reproduced in their original spelling — “prouerbes” stays “prouerbes” — with a modernised gloss where it aids reading. If we cannot verify the exact wording of an early citation, we give the date and source without inventing a quotation.
Corrections and review
Etymology is a living field; antedatings are found and claims are revised. Each entry shows when it was last reviewed. If you can point us to an earlier attestation or a better source than the one we cite, we want to hear it — send it to us with the reference and we will check it and, where warranted, update the entry and note the change.