This phrase is used whenever someone is hemmed in by an abundance of something they still cannot use. It might be said of a person with plenty of money but no time to spend it, a house full of food but nothing anyone can actually eat, or any case where plenty and want sit side by side. The line is usually quoted dryly, pointing up the cruelty of a near miss rather than any genuine good fortune, and it works equally well as a complaint or as black humour about one’s own situation.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘water water everywhere and not a drop to drink’?
The phrase comes from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, published in 1798 in Lyrical Ballads, the collection he produced with William Wordsworth. In the poem, a sailor stranded on a becalmed ship is surrounded by sea on every side, yet has nothing to drink, since the water around him is salt and cannot relieve his thirst.
That literal scene, a man dying of thirst while afloat on endless water, is the source of the irony the phrase now carries whenever it is used away from the sea. By extension from that image, the line has come to describe any situation in which someone is in the midst of plenty but cannot partake of it. The everyday version people reach for usually drops Coleridge’s commas and tightens the wording slightly, giving the smoother, more conversational form that is now standard, even among those who have never read the poem itself.
The underlying contrast, being surrounded by abundance yet starved of the one useful part of it, is what has kept the line in circulation well beyond its original nautical setting. It has become a stock way of describing frustration at a resource that is visible everywhere but reachable nowhere, whether the resource in question is water, money, opportunity or anything else that mocks the person who cannot get at it.