crocodile tears

The popular story

The image is old and unforgettable: a crocodile seizes its prey and then weeps as it devours the flesh, shedding tears over the very creature it is eating. To shed crocodile tears, in this telling, is to counterfeit sorrow while doing harm, the mourner and the killer being one and the same. For centuries the belief that crocodiles literally cry over their meals was taken as plain natural fact, repeated by travellers, preachers and poets alike, long before anyone paused to ask whether the animals actually did any such thing.

The tale is usually traced to a single medieval bestseller. The travel book known as The Voyage and Travail of Sir John Mandeville, compiled in the fourteenth century and hugely popular in English by around 1400, described great serpents in distant lands that slew men and wept as they ate them. The book mixed real report with pure invention, but its vivid details lodged the weeping crocodile firmly in the English imagination.

Mandeville, though, was passing on a belief already centuries old. Ancient writers had reported that crocodiles wept, and the notion recurs through classical and medieval natural history, where the animal became a stock emblem of the treacherous predator who mourns the victim it destroys. By the time English readers met it, the weeping crocodile was less a zoological observation than a ready-made moral figure waiting to be turned into a phrase.

What the record shows

Two separate things need dating: the myth, and the phrase that grew out of it. The myth is genuinely ancient, reported by classical authors well before the Middle Ages. Its passage into wider English readership owes most to Mandeville’s compilation, where the image is stated flatly:

These serpents slay men, and then, weeping, eat them.

That is a description of a belief, not yet the idiom. It tells the reader that crocodiles weep; it does not yet use their tears as a byword for hypocrisy. The step from natural-history claim to figure of speech is the crucial one, and it can be dated.

The set phrase crocodile tears is first found in English in 1563, in a letter by Edmund Grindal, a senior churchman, who suspected that a man’s shows of humility and grief were a performance:

I begin to fear, lest his humility … be a counterfeit humility, and his tears crocodile tears.

Two features of that sentence matter. First, Grindal pairs the tears with ‘counterfeit humility’, which shows the phrase already carrying its modern charge of calculated pretence. Second, he uses it without explaining it, as though a reader would understand the allusion at once, which suggests the image was common currency even if this is its earliest surviving written form.

By the turn of the seventeenth century the association was common enough for Shakespeare to lean on it. In Othello (around 1603) the crocodile stands as shorthand for false weeping, and the same imagery recurs across Elizabethan and Jacobean writing, so that within a few decades of Grindal’s letter the crocodile’s tears had become a fixed literary commonplace rather than an exotic borrowing.

The verdict

This one is attested. The idiom has a firm earliest date in the sixteenth century, a named source, and a clear line of descent from an older, well-documented myth. What is false is not the history of the phrase but the natural history behind it. Crocodiles do secrete fluid from glands near the eyes, and this may be visible while they feed, but it is a physiological reflex, not grief or guilt. The animal feels nothing; the tears are real liquid and empty of meaning, which is exactly why the metaphor has proved so durable.

What we don’t know

We cannot say whether Grindal coined the phrase or simply wrote down something already circulating in speech; a first surviving citation marks the earliest record, not necessarily the earliest use. Nor can the myth be tied to a single originator, since versions of the weeping-crocodile belief appear across several ancient and medieval traditions. The honest position is that the phrase is securely dated while its ultimate folk source is diffuse.

How it changed

The expression travelled from literal claim to fixed metaphor. Early readers took the weeping crocodile as a fact of the natural world; by Grindal’s time the animal had become a byword for hypocrisy, and the literal belief mattered less than the moral it carried. Once the metaphor was established it no longer needed the myth to be true, and today most speakers use the phrase with no thought of crocodiles at all.

Usage today

Crocodile tears now belong chiefly to the language of politics, business and public scandal, where displays of regret are routinely suspected of being staged. The phrase carries a sharp accusation: it says not merely that grief is absent but that it is being faked for advantage, often by the party responsible for the damage. That double charge, feigned feeling plus self-interest, keeps it in steady use whenever an apology looks too convenient to believe.

There is a small irony in the phrase’s survival. The natural-history belief that gave rise to it has been thoroughly discredited, yet the metaphor is stronger than ever, precisely because it no longer depends on the biology being true. Whether or not a crocodile can weep is beside the point; what endures is the picture of grief and harm coming from the same mouth. That is why the expression still lands, four and a half centuries after Grindal reached for it, whenever public sorrow looks like a performance.