The calm before the storm is a quiet spell just before trouble arrives, said with foreboding rather than relief. The phrase is first recorded in 1608, in the play The Dumb Knight, where it appears as a calm before the tempest. It fits real weather and any lull before a hard stretch equally well.
What is the origin of the phrase ‘the calm before the storm’?
The phrase ‘the calm before the storm’ dates back to early modern English, but didn’t establish itself as a well known saying until the final decades of the 1700s. The term’s first known use is found in the early 17th-century play, The Dumb Knight, in which a character exclaims, ‘… but hush, no words; there is a calm before the tempest.’ A tempest is a strong storm, and the idiom took hold through the 1700s and 1800s until tempest was replaced by ‘storm’. In the first half of the 20th century, there were over 1300 uses of the phrase, but this declined after the Second World War.
The play reached print in London in 1608, as “A historicall Comedy, acted sundry times by the children of his Maiesties Reuels”, printed by Nicholas Okes for John Bache. Lewis Machin put his own name to it and credited a collaborator he left unnamed, though a 1608 copy in the Garrick Collection carries “the name of his ‘partner in the wrong’ on the title-page, viz., Jervis or Gervase Markham”. In the text printed in A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume 10, the line belongs to Collaquintida, a go-between steering the lecherous Alphonso towards a locked bedchamber: “but hush! no words; there is a calm before the tempest.” Alphonso answers “Tut, tell me of no storms; but direct me to her bed-chamber”, so both weather words were already doing the same work inside a single exchange.
Both halves of the phrase are older than the phrase itself. The Online Etymology Dictionary dates the noun calm, in the sense “absence of storm or wind”, to about 1400, and takes tempest through Old French to Latin tempestas, a word whose sense ran “from ‘period of time’ to ‘period of weather,’ to ‘bad weather’ to ‘storm.’” The older word still carries the same image in tempest in a teapot.
The modern wording, with storm in place of tempest, was in print by the 1820s. Mary Shelley used it figuratively in The Last Man in 1826, of a king who squandered his last chance to save himself: “so far from profiting by this last calm before the storm to save himself, he sought to forget anticipated evil”.
The saying was originally meant in the literal sense, spoken by sailors about how calm the weather and sailing conditions become just before a storm rolls in. During the calm, the wind dies down, birds stop chirping, the air sometimes feels heavy, and the tides start to subside.
It wasn’t long after the first recorded use of the phrase that the phrase was also used in a figurative way, as a metaphor for any situation or circumstance in which there is a period of peace and tranquillity just before a mad rush of activity or difficulty or challenge of some kind.
What are some notable uses of the phrase ‘the calm before the storm’?
In news reports during Hurricane Katrina which took place in 2005, the phrase “calm before the storm” was frequently used to describe the quiet before the hurricane devastated the Gulf Coast.
The phrase has been used frequently in political contexts. For example, during the prelude to major global conflicts, such as World War I and World War II, the idiom was used to describe the seeming peace and prosperity of the pre-war years before the outbreak of violence.
In Moby Dick, published in 1851, Herman Melville portrays a “calm before the storm” during the sailors’ journey before their encounter with the titular whale. The moment of tranquillity on the sea is contrasted with the fierce confrontation that follows.
Much more recently, the pop-punk band Fall Out Boy released a song titled Calm Before the Storm in 2003 on their debut album Take This to Your Grave. The song uses the phrase as a metaphor for emotional buildup and personal turmoil before a dramatic climax in relationships, much as the idiom is used in ordinary speech.