On the mend means getting better: recovering from an illness or an injury, or improving after a bad patch. Mend is a shortened form of amend, and the Online Etymology Dictionary records the phrase as attested by 1802. It is said of people, and of anything else that is picking up after a setback.
What is the origin of the phrase ‘On the mend’?
The phrase and idiom ‘On the mend’ is believed to have originated from Middle English, or in other words in mediaeval times. It is derived from the Middle English verb ‘menden’ which in turn is a shortened form of the Old French verb ‘amender’, which means ‘to correct, set right, make better, improve’. Much like the word ‘amend’ which means ‘to put right’.
The Online Etymology Dictionary puts a date on that shortening. Mend entered English about 1200 in the sense of repairing clothes, a tool or a building, and it did so, in that dictionary’s words, “from a shortened form of Old French amender”. There was never a separate Old French verb ‘menden’ behind it.
While it is difficult to pinpoint the exact first use of the phrase “on the mend,” it became popular in the English language by the 1800s to describe the process of recovery and improvement.
The Online Etymology Dictionary records the phrase itself as attested by 1802, and glosses it as “on the path to recovering from sickness, improving in condition”. That gloss has two halves, and the second one covers uses that have nothing to do with health.
The term ‘mend’ is still used today to describe fixing something that has come into disrepair. While initially the term was used to describe fixing physical objects, it later came to be used to describe fixing less tangible things, such as someone’s emotions, or their relationships or career.
Those wider senses are older than they look. The Online Etymology Dictionary dates the sense “to put right, atone for (faults and errors), amend (one’s life), repent” to about 1300, and the intransitive sense “to grow better, improve” to the late fourteenth century. That intransitive use is the one the phrase depends on: a patient who is mending is not being repaired by anyone, they are simply improving. The verb had roughly four hundred years of that behind it before anyone put ‘on the’ in front of it.
For the sense in current use, the Cambridge Dictionary gives ‘on the mend’ as “becoming healthy after an illness”.
What are some notable uses of the phrase ‘On the mend’?
Historically, the phrase ‘On the mend’ has been used in the publication The New York Times to describe the recovery of President Ulysses Simpson Grant, a war hero, the one-time general of the army, and later, the 18th President of the United States between the years of 1869 and 1877.
What the Victorian novels carry is the bare verb, not the phrase. Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights”, published in 1847, has Zillah, the housekeeper at the Heights, report of the ailing Linton that “the lad was mending nicely”; the phrase ‘on the mend’ is not in the novel.
Charles Dickens does the same in ‘Bleak House’, published in 1853, for the recovery of Charley, the child servant nursed through a dangerous illness: “She flutteringly and slowly turned the dangerous point, after long lingering there, and then began to mend.” Again the full phrase does not appear in the book.
For the phrase itself in print, John Davis’s journal of John McKinlay’s expedition across Australia, published in London in 1863, has the camp note “Middleton decidedly on the mend” about a sick man in the party. It is set down without explanation, in the same off-hand way it would be used today.
Ten years earlier it was already being used of something other than a body. In Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon, Volume 1, published in 1853, the American naval officer William Lewis Herndon fixed his departure date so “That the rains might be entirely over, and the roads on the mend in the Cordillera”. Roads mend when the weather stops ruining them.
That is still the range it covers. Somebody who was under the weather last week is on the mend this week, and so is a company that is back on track after a bad quarter.