To throw in the towel is to give up. The origin is boxing: a fighter’s corner throws a towel into the ring to concede. The gesture began with a sponge, recorded from 1845; the towel is recorded from 1904. Away from the ring the phrase means to admit defeat and stop trying.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘Throw in the towel’?
This little expression of course derives from boxing. When a boxer is suffering a beating and his corner want to stop the fight they literally throw in the towel to indicate their conceding of the fight. This earliest citation that I have found of this is in the American newspaper The Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, January 1913:
Murphy went after him, landing right and left undefended face. The crowd importuned referee Griffin to stop the fight and a towel was thrown from Burns’ corner as a token of defeat.
It was very soon after that that the phrase began to be used in a figurative sense, to indicate giving up in non-boxing contexts; for example, in the Australian author Clarence James Dennis’s WWI patriotic novel, The Moods of Ginger Mick, 1916:
No matter wot ‘e done. It’s jist a thing
I knoo ‘e’d do if once ‘e got the show.
An’ it would never please ‘im fer to sling
Tall tork at ‘im jist cos ‘e acted so.
”Don’t make a song uv it!” I ‘ear ‘im growl,
“I’ve done me limit, an’ tossed in the tow’l.”
Green’s Dictionary of Slang states the origin plainly, as “boxing use, whereby a towel or sponge thrown into the ring indicates the retirement of a fighter who is losing badly”, and it has both of the uses above earlier, in Australia rather than America. Its first full citation for a towel in the ring is the Sydney Sportsman of 7 September 1904, which reported that “Waving wildly for a foul, one. of Pearl’s seconds dropped his towel over the ropes.” The figurative sense turns up there too, in the Sydney Bulletin of 1 December 1910, in an account of a battle between two colonies of ants: “towards sundown there wasn’t one black ant to chuck the towel in.” Those early examples are all marked Australian, so on the evidence collected so far the towel was a habit of the Australian ring before it became an American one.
Throwing in the towel was preceded by throwing in the sponge. Sponges were a common ringside accessory as early as the 18th century. Throwing in the sponge was then the preferred method of conceding defeat. This is recorded in the mid-19th century, in The Slang Dictionary, 1860:
‘To throw up the sponge,’ to submit, give over the struggle, - from the practice of throwing up the sponge used to cleanse the combatants’ faces, at a prize-fight, as a signal that the ‘mill’ is concluded.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang carries the sponge back further still, to the London paper The Era of 26 January 1845, which reported of a bout that “The sponge was thrown up in token of submission”. The Slang Dictionary quoted above is John Camden Hotten’s, and the scanned 1860 edition holds that entry at page 224; a “mill” was a prize fight. The Online Etymology Dictionary dates the variant “throw in the sponge” to that same year of 1860 and gives it the same source, “prizefighting, in reference to the sponges used to cleanse the faces of combatants between rounds”. So the sponge was doing the job for roughly sixty years before the towel took it over, and for a while the two ran together.
Curiously, throwing a hat into the ring has pretty much the opposite meaning to throwing in a towel - one means join a contest and the other means leave it. Despite the surface similarity, the two phrases are unconnected.
