‘Get a move on’ is an instruction to hurry up, used to tell someone to move, proceed or work faster. It is most often aimed at a person who is dawdling or taking too long over something, whether that is getting ready to leave the house, finishing a task, or simply walking too slowly. It can also be used of oneself, as a kind of self-prompt to pick up the pace, and it carries a slightly impatient, informal tone rather than a polite request.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘get a move on’?
The phrase is American in origin and belongs to the late nineteenth century, a period when “move” had already shifted from meaning simply to change position to meaning to hurry or hasten. The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms, as reproduced on dictionary.com, says that “the first colloquial expression dates from the late 1800s”, without naming a specific year or pointing to an earliest printed example.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang treats the wording as part of a wider American use of the verb “move” to mean hurry, glossing the sense as “to hurry up, to get a move on” and labelling it US usage. It does not give the full phrase its own separate headword with a dated first citation, so no specific earliest printed record of the exact wording “get a move on” has been pinned down in that source. What is clear across the available evidence is that the expression grew out of an existing colloquial sense of “move” meaning to get going quickly, and that by the close of the nineteenth century it had settled into the fixed command form still used today.
The phrase has stayed remarkably stable since then. It is used in exactly the same way now as it evidently was over a century ago, as a brisk, informal push to stop delaying and get going, whether said to someone else or muttered to oneself while running late.