Someone who is out of their gourd is crazy, or at least behaving as if they are. The phrase is American and informal, and it stretches easily to cover temporary states as well as permanent ones: you can be bored out of your gourd, scared out of your gourd, or, in the usage that helped spread it in the 1960s, stoned out of your gourd. In every case the gourd is the head, and the image is of a mind that has left the building.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘out of your gourd’?
A gourd is the hard-shelled fruit of a climbing plant, and for most of history its main use came after it was dried: hollowed out, the shell made a serviceable bowl, bottle or dipper. A roundish, hollow container roughly the size of a head was never going to escape the attention of slang, which has always enjoyed recasting the skull as an empty vessel.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang records ‘gourd’ as American slang for the head from 1837, when Asa Greene’s A Glance at New York has the threat “I’ll hit you over de gourd wid my trumpet”. By 1851 ‘gourd-head’ was in print as a name for a blockhead, in the Southern humour collection Polly Peablossom’s Wedding. French speakers had the same idea independently: ‘gourde’ is a colloquial French word for a dope or an idiot. That parallel is sometimes offered as the source of the American usage, but the borrowing has not been demonstrated, and the vegetable-for-dimwit metaphor is common enough that the two could easily have sprouted separately.
‘Out of your gourd’ itself is much later. It is often loosely dated to the 1950s, but the earliest citations Green’s can supply are from the early 1960s, and they arrive wearing the drug sense first: Malcolm Braly’s 1963 novel Shake Him Till He Rattles has “Bombed out of his gourd”. The plain ‘crazy’ sense follows almost immediately, in Ken Kesey’s 1964 novel Sometimes a Great Notion: “You out of your gourd?”. The variant ‘off your gourd’ developed alongside it.
The construction was not invented from scratch. English already had ‘out of your head’, ‘out of your mind’ and ‘out of your skull’, and the 1960s added ‘out of your tree’ on the same template. Slotting a fresh word for the head into that frame is routine slang-making, much as lose your marbles swapped a new object into an old idea of mislaid wits. Of all the variants, the gourd version has worn best in American speech, perhaps because it is the most pleasing to say.