To say you are feeling under the weather is to admit to a mild illness, or simply to a lack of your usual energy. It is a soft, understated way of describing being off colour, whether that means a cold coming on, a hangover, or just a general sense of not being right. The phrase is rarely used for serious illness. It suits small complaints, the kind that make you want to stay in rather than the kind that need a doctor.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘under the weather’?
The phrase is generally agreed to have started life at sea. In nautical language, sailing “under the weather shore” meant sheltering somewhere the water was smoother, in other words finding a safe anchorage out of the worst of the wind. Wordorigins.org traces a closely related expression, “under the sea,” meaning to ride out a storm in such a protected spot, back to a 1627 seamanship manual by John Smith of Virginia, and notes that although “under the weather” itself became an Americanism, it grew out of this older British nautical vocabulary.
The earliest known printed use of the exact phrase comes from 1803, in a reply written by the editor of the Philadelphia Aurora, in a passage otherwise packed with nautical turns of phrase. Etymonline dates the sense “in difficulties” to that same 1803 appearance, suggesting it may originally have meant something closer to “held in jail,” and places the more familiar meaning of “indisposed” or unwell at around 1810. At that stage the expression was still treated as a piece of sailors’ slang rather than everyday speech.
A popular story holds that seasick or ailing sailors were sent below the ship’s “weather deck,” which supposedly gave the phrase its link to illness, sometimes told more specifically as “under the weather bow,” referring to the side of the vessel that took the brunt of a storm. This account is widely repeated but poorly supported. Investigations into the phrase’s early use have found no actual examples of “under the weather” being used in that sick-bay sense, while many nineteenth century sightings of the words had nothing to do with physical illness at all. What does turn up repeatedly through that century is “under the weather” paired with other terms describing a ship’s exposed side, such as “under the weather bow” and “under the weather quarter,” which fits a general sense of being caught in difficulty rather than a specific tale about sick sailors below decks.