“From your lips to God’s ears” is the reply you give when someone voices a hope you fervently share: may God hear what you have just said and make it so. A friend predicts that the test results will come back clear, or that the house will sell by spring, and you answer, “from your lips to God’s ears”. The tone is warm and often a little rueful, acknowledging that the outcome is out of both your hands. The saying is most at home in American English, and speakers freely swap “lips” for “mouth” and “ears” for “ear” without changing the sense.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘from your lips to God’s ears’?
The expression is a direct translation of a Yiddish saying, “fun dayn moyl in gots oyern”, literally “from your mouth into God’s ears”, which the Jewish English Lexicon records as the source of the English phrase. It was the stock Yiddish response to a blessing or a hopeful prediction, and it crossed into American English with the great wave of Ashkenazi Jewish immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Lillian Feinsilver’s guide The Taste of Yiddish (1970) glosses one version, “fun zayn moyl, in Gots oyer”, as “May God hear what he has said (and fulfil it)!”
The underlying formula is older than Yiddish and belongs to no single language. Nigel Rees, in Cassell’s Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins (2002), notes an Arab version running “to the Gates of Heaven” and suggests the sentiment may stem from Psalm 130: “Lord, hear my voice: let thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications.” Greek has the same proverb, and it produced the earliest English rendering I can find. In Tales of a Greek Island (1912), Julia Dragoumis has a village woman answer a neighbour’s reassurance about her sick daughter:
“May it go from your lips to God’s ear,” answered the woman gratefully; “good-night to you.”
In Yiddish literature the saying was already proverbial by the 1890s. It belongs to the everyday speech of Sholem Aleichem’s characters, including Tevye the dairyman, the hero of the stories (first published in 1894) that later became Fiddler on the Roof. Aliza Shevrin’s 2009 Penguin translation renders one of Tevye’s exchanges as “From your lips to God’s ears! May our enemies have as much good health as I understand…”
As a naturalised English phrase it is a mid-twentieth-century arrival. The earliest Google Books match for the full wording is Robert Mende’s 1949 novel Spit and the Stars, which has “from your mouth to God’s ears”. Google Books data shows the expression barely registers before the 1950s, climbs steadily from the 1970s as Yiddishisms poured into mainstream American English, and was still rising through the 2000s. By the 1980s and 90s it was a fixture of American fiction and journalism; Rees catches it in a 1995 London Evening Standard piece in which a prediction that the Bond film GoldenEye would take thirty million dollars in its opening weekend drew the reply “From your lips to God’s ears”. Gregory Titelman’s Random House Dictionary of Popular Proverbs and Sayings (1996) glosses it simply: may the prediction or wish you are making come true.
One curiosity of the crossing: the Yiddish versions all have “moyl”, mouth, yet English overwhelmingly prefers “lips”. Writing on Language Log in 2007, the linguist Arnold Zwicky found “from your lips to God’s ears” comfortably the most common English form, with the mouth-and-singular-ear versions, closer to the Yiddish, trailing well behind. The phrase sits on the same shelf as on a wing and a prayer, another everyday idiom that treats hope as a kind of prayer.