Tilting at windmills means attacking imaginary enemies or fighting a battle that cannot be won. Tilting is jousting, and the windmills are the ones Don Quixote charged in Cervantes’ novel, published in Spanish in 1605 and in English in 1612. The things he tilted at were windmills, which he had taken for giants.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘Tilting at windmills’?
Tilting is jousting. The expression ‘tilting at windmills’ derives from Cervantes’ Don Quixote - first published in 1604, under the title The Ingenious Knight of La Mancha.
The novel recounts the exploits of would-be knight ‘Don Quixote’ and his loyal servant Sancho Panza
who propose to fight injustice through chivalry. It is considered one of the major literary masterpieces and remains a best seller in numerous translations.
John Ormsby, whose translation of the novel is on Project Gutenberg, sets the dates out in his introduction. Of the first part he writes that “The printing was finished in December, and the book came out with the new year, 1605”; the second part “was not printed till the very end of 1615”. English readers met the windmills through Thomas Shelton, whose version Ormsby describes as “the first in any language”, made “apparently, about 1608, but not published till 1612”.
In the book, which also gives us the adjective quixotic (striving for visionary ideals), the eponymous hero imagines himself to be fighting giants when he attacks windmills.
Just then they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills that rise from that plain. And no sooner did Don Quixote see them that he said to his squire, “Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we ourselves could have wished. Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them. With their spoils we shall begin to be rich for this is a righteous war and the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth is a service God will bless.”
“What giants?” asked Sancho Panza.
“Those you see over there,” replied his master, “with their long arms. Some of them have arms well nigh two leagues in length.”
“Take care, sir,” cried Sancho. “Those over there are not giants but windmills. Those things that seem to be their arms are sails which, when they are whirled around by the wind, turn the millstone.”
Shelton’s translation puts the same warning like this: “those which appear there are no giants, but windmills; and that which seems in them to be arms, are their sails”. What Don Quixote tilted at were windmills, and the giants were only in his head.
Apart from in medieval re-enactments, we don’t tilt in the sense of joust, any longer. These days ‘tilting at windmills’ refers to attacks of a less militaristic nature.
The tilt in the phrase is the tournament word. Etymonline records the noun from the 1510s, as “a combat between two armed men on horseback, each trying to throw the other from the saddle; the exercise of charging with a spear sharp or blunted, against an antagonist or a mark”, and the verb “to joust, charge with the lance” from the 1590s. Both senses were current in English well before Shelton’s translation appeared.
The first figurative references to tilting at windmills, that is one where no jousting took place, came in the 17th century. John Cleveland published The character of a London diurnall in 1644 (a diurnall was, as you might expect, part-way between a diary or journal):
“The Quixotes of this Age fight with the Wind-mills of their owne Heads.”
Cleveland’s pamphlet survives in the Early English Books scans at the Internet Archive, where the 1644 printing reads “of this Age fight with the Wind-mills of their owne heads”. The windmill is already standing for an enemy the fighter has invented, although nobody is tilting at it yet.
The full form of the phrase isn’t used until towards the end of the 19th century; for example, in The New York Times, April 1870:
“They [Western Republicans] have not thus far had sufficient of an organization behind them to make their opposition to the Committee’s bill anything more than tilting at windmills.”
Etymonline dates the figurative phrase earlier than that. Its entry for tilt (v.2) says: “The figurative phrase tilting at windmills is suggested in English by 1798; the image is from Don Quixote, who mistook them for giants.” The 1870 New York Times passage above is the earliest full-form example quoted here.
Cambridge Dictionary enters the idiom under the shorter form ‘tilt at windmills’, marks it literary, and defines it as “to fight enemies who do not really exist”. That is how it is used now: a fool’s errand against an opponent who was never there, nearer to a wild goose chase than to a fight.