“Throw in the Towel” — the boxing signal that grew out of an older sponge

The popular story

The usual telling is simple and, for once, mostly right: “throw in the towel” comes from boxing. When a fighter is taking a beating and his corner wants to stop the fight, someone throws a towel into the ring to signal surrender. The referee sees it, the bout ends, and the phrase passes into everyday speech to mean giving up on anything at all.

The only part of that story people usually get wrong is the towel itself.

What the record shows

The gesture is older than the towel. For roughly sixty years, the object thrown into the ring was a sponge — the same sponge a fighter’s seconds used to wipe blood and sweat from his face between rounds. The earliest form of the expression is “throw up the sponge,” and Green’s Dictionary of Slang traces it to the London sporting paper The Era on 26 January 1845, which reported that “the sponge was thrown up in token of submission.” A variant, “throw in the sponge,” is dated by the Online Etymology Dictionary to 1860, again explicitly from prizefighting.

The towel arrives much later. The literal act is reported in the Sydney Sportsman of 7 September 1904, and the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette of January 1913 states plainly that “a towel was thrown from Burns’ corner as a token of defeat.” The wording we use today is captured in Jack London’s 1913 story “The Mexican,” where “Danny’s corner refused to throw in the towel.”

The verdict

Attested. This is one of the well-documented idioms: the boxing origin is real, the concession gesture is real, and both the sponge and towel forms have dated citations from reputable references. The only correction to the folk version is chronological — the sponge came first (1845), and the towel replaced it around the turn of the twentieth century (c. 1904–1913).

What we don’t know

We can’t pin down the exact first person to throw an actual towel, or the precise year the towel overtook the sponge as the standard prop; the two overlapped for a period. Nor is there a single “first ever” printed use of “throw in the towel” that every source agrees on — the 1904 and 1913 citations are the earliest clear ones, but earlier ring reports may yet surface. The 1845 sponge date is firmer, though even that marks the first recorded use, not necessarily the first spoken one.

How it changed

The idiom evolved with the equipment. “Throw up the sponge” (1845) gave way to “throw in the sponge” (1860), and then to “throw in the towel” (early 1900s) as towels became the handier, more visible object to toss over the ropes. The meaning never shifted — it always signalled conceding a fight — but the phrase broadened from the literal ring to any situation where someone gives up.

Usage today

“Throw in the towel” is now the dominant form by a wide margin, used far beyond sport: a business folding, a candidate conceding, a person abandoning a diet. “Throw in the sponge” survives as a slightly old-fashioned alternative, and “throw up the sponge” is now largely archaic. Example: “After the third failed funding round, the founders finally threw in the towel and shut the company down.”