Time and tide wait for no man means that no one can hold time back, so do not put things off. Tide here is an old word for time, not the sea; the pairing dates to the early 13th century. The Cambridge Dictionary gives the saying as “said to emphasize that people cannot stop the passing of time, and therefore should not delay doing things”.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘Time and tide wait for no man’?
The origin is uncertain, although it’s clear that the phrase is ancient and that it pre-dates modern English. The earliest known record is from St. Marher, 1225:
“And te tide and te time þat tu iboren were, schal beon iblescet.”
A version in modern English - “the tide abides for, tarrieth for no man, stays no man, tide nor time tarrieth no man” evolved into the present day version.
The notion of ‘tide’ being beyond man’s control brings up images of the King Canute story. He demonstrated to his courtiers the limits of a king’s power by failing to make the sea obey his command. That literal interpretation of ‘tide’ in ‘time and tide’ is what is now usually understood, but wasn’t what was meant in the original version of the expression. ‘Tide’ didn’t refer to the contemporary meaning of the word, that is, the rising and falling of the sea, but to a period of time. When this phrase was coined tide meant a season, or a time, or a while. The word is still with us in that sense in ‘good tidings’, which refers to a good event or occasion and Whitsuntide, noontide etc.
Etymonline sets out the word history behind that reading. Middle English tide meant “time, season; recurring interval, space of time,” from Old English tid, and those time senses in English are now mostly archaic. The sea senses came later: “time of the tide” about 1300 and “rise and fall of the sea, flow of the tidal current” in the mid 14th century, probably reached through the idea of a fixed time, the time of high water. Etymonline dates the alliterative pairing of time and tide to the early 13th century and notes that in it the two words are synonyms, the pair originally indicating “on all occasions” or “as warranted.” On that reading the proverb says the same thing twice over: time waits for no one.
Chaucer states the thought plainly. In The Clerk’s Tale, in the speech where the people ask their lord to take a wife, the couplet beginning at line 118 of Walter Skeat’s edition runs:
“For though we slepe or wake, or rome, or ryde, Ay fleeth the tyme, it nil no man abyde.”
Whether we sleep or wake or roam or ride, time flees and will wait for no man.
The tide half of the proverb was a saying in its own right in the 16th century. John Heywood’s dialogue of proverbs, printed in 1546, has “The sure Seaman seeth, the tide tarieth no man,” and puts it in the same run of sayings as the smith’s forge advice to strike while the iron is hot and the counsel to make hay while the sun shines. George Wapull used it as the title of a play printed in 1576, The Tide Tarrieth No Man. Robert Greene brought both words into it in his 1592 pamphlet A Disputation Betweene a Hee Conny-catcher and a Shee Conny-catcher, writing of “growing on in yeeres, as tyde nor tyme tarrieth no man.”
The doubled form was settled by the time John Ray gathered it into A Collection of English Proverbs: it is in the first edition of 1670, and the second edition of 1678 prints it as “Time and tide tarry for no man.” Tarry then gave way to other verbs. Routledge’s A Handbook of Proverbs of 1873 records the English form as “Time and tide stay for no man,” and lists a Scottish version beside it, “Time and tide for nae man bide.” The wordings in use today are that same proverb carried on: time waits for no man, time and tide wait for none, time and tide waits for no man.