Someone or something on a tear is in the middle of a hot streak: a striker who can’t stop scoring, a team reeling off wins, a stock market that climbs week after week. The phrase is a favourite of sportswriters and the financial press, where whole economies are routinely reported to be on a tear, but it works for any burst of unstoppable activity, from a novelist producing three books in two years to a toddler wrecking a living room. One warning for anyone meeting it in print: this tear rhymes with “air”, like tearing paper, not with the tear that is wept.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘on a tear’?
The pronunciation is the clue to the origin. The tear in question is the ripping, rushing verb, not the weeping noun. English has used tear for headlong movement for centuries; the etymology reference Etymonline dates the colloquial sense “move noisily and with vigorous haste and turbulence” to the 1590s. Someone who tore about, tore round or tore through town was moving fast and loudly, and Green’s Dictionary of Slang derives the slang noun from precisely that use: a tear was a bout of going at full tilt.
The noun surfaced in America in the mid nineteenth century, and at first a tear was a spree, almost always a drunken one. The earliest example in Green’s Dictionary of Slang is from George G. Foster’s New York in Slices (1849), a reporter’s tour of the city’s night haunts: “It is Thursday night, and a grand ‘tear’ is to be held in that large and rather aristocratic looking cellar across the way.”
Early users sometimes spelled it as it sounded. The New York Clipper in 1854 described “some of the boys on a ‘bit of a tare’”, a spelling Green’s records persisting for decades. The dictionary-makers of American slang knew the family well: John Russell Bartlett’s Dictionary of Americanisms (1877 edition) defines “to tear round” as “to make a fuss; to create a disturbance”, and John S. Farmer’s Americanisms Old and New (1889) adds that tearing round usually conveyed “noisy boisterousness produced by intoxication”.
The drinking sense had a long life in print. In Stephen Crane’s slum novella Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), a Bowery neighbour asks, “What’s up? Dat Johnson party on anudder tear?”, and in Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street (1920) a gossip reports that a woman and “couple of other skirts bought a whole case of whisky and went on a tear”. In Ireland the old meaning never left: to be on the tear is still to be out drinking, a usage Green’s documents from the 1920s to the present.
The approving modern sense grew out of the same idea of unstoppable momentum. American college slang had already pushed the word towards achievement, with a dialect glossary of 1900 cited in Green’s defining tear as “a brilliant success”, and during the twentieth century the phrase settled into the language of winning streaks and bull markets. The American Heritage Dictionary now defines being on a tear as being “in a state of intense, sustained activity”, its example a marathon runner winning twelve of his next thirteen races. The rampage became a run of form, and only the pronunciation still remembers the ripping. British sportswriting has its own home-grown word for the same hot streak: the purple patch.