Where Did Dead As A Doornail Come From
Olivia Luz
Dead as a doornail since ordinary nails aren t used in making doors perhaps the nail in this phrase which can be traced all the way back to 1350 was a small metal plate nailed on a door that visitors pounded with the knockers attached to it when announcing their arrival.
Dead as a doornail is just one such example. I kno what it means but am curious where it came from. Some common english idioms are. What s the origin of the phrase as dead as a doornail.
The only on which the knocker sat may be concept fairly lifeless because of the shape of cases it were knocked on the top. Where did the term dead as a doornail come from. There s a reference to it in print in 1350 a translation by william langland of the french poem guillaume de palerne. He writes that old marley was dead as a door nail.
A doornail because of its length and probably antiquity might want to look lifeless sufficient for any proverb. As deaf as a door post doornail as blind as a bat as dead as a doornail as poor as a church mouse as fat as a pig as dumb i e. Yet william and mary morris contained in the morris dictionary of note and word origins quote a correspondent who factors out that it would want to come from. I was wondering where it came from.
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The dictionary defines a doornail as a large headed nail easily clinched for nailing doors through the battens. If something is as dead as a doornail there is no hope of it ever having life or use again. The bard did however have a hand in making the phrase popular. Where did the idiom come from.
I often hear the phrase dead as a door nail. After all the doornail was never alive right. It was around long before shakespeare was writing his plays and sonnets. Actually it s much older than that having appeared in the fourteenth century vision of piers plowman and in shakespeare s henry iv.
Dead as a doornail is an expression most of us learned first in dickens s a christmas carol. Life would eventually be pounded out of the nail in that way. Faith without works is feebler than nothing and dead as a doornail. The term goes back to the 1300s the phrase dead as a doornail is found in poems of the time.
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The term means that something is totally and completely dead.Source : pinterest.com