This saying means that the person who starts something ahead of everyone else, or makes the effort to turn up before the competition, is the one who reaps the reward. It is most often used as a nudge towards promptness, whether that means getting out of bed before the rest of the household or beating rivals to an opportunity. It is a close variant of ‘The early bird catches the worm’, with “gets” standing in for the older and still more common “catches”. The picture behind both forms is the same: a bird up at dawn finds the worm before a later riser does.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘it’s the early bird that gets the worm’?
The saying is often credited to William Camden’s proverb collection of 1605, but this attribution does not survive scrutiny. The first edition of that work, titled Remaines of a Greater Worke: Concerning Britaine, did not contain the saying at all, and it was still absent from Camden’s third edition in 1623. The earliest edition confirmed to carry it is the 1636 printing of Remaines Concerning Britaine, which lists it among a run of similar sayings as “The early bird catcheth the worme.” The phrase appears again, independently, in John Ray’s A Collection of English Proverbs in 1670, in the same “catcheth” wording.
From these seventeenth century printings the proverb settled into general use in the “catches” form, which remains the standard wording today. “Gets” is a later, plainer substitution for “catches” that keeps the same meaning and the same image, and it circulates as one of several minor variants rather than as a form with its own separate history. The underlying sense has stayed constant throughout: whoever acts first, or rises earliest, gets to the prize before anyone slower manages to.