To work out usually means to exercise, doing a session of physical training such as at the gym or as part of a fitness routine. The phrase also covers other senses that remain common today. To work out a problem is to solve it, as with a sum or an equation. To work things out between people means resolving a disagreement. More generally, to work something out is to achieve it through effort, as when plans eventually work out.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘work out’?
The phrase is old, and its earliest meaning has almost nothing to do with exercise. By the mid-1500s, “worked out” was used of a resource, such as a mine, that had been exhausted through use, the idea being that all its value had been laboured out of it. Around the same period, “work out” also carried the sense of accomplishing something by effort, as in working out a solution to a problem, a usage that survives intact today.
A related but distinct sense developed in the second half of the 1600s, when “work out” came to mean discharging a debt through labour rather than money, so that someone might work out what they owed in service instead of cash. By the mid-1800s the phrase had also settled into its familiar problem-solving sense, meaning to find a solution for something, whether an equation or a personal dispute.
The exercise meaning is the most recent addition. The noun “workout” first appeared in 1909 to describe a boxing practice bout, a dating confirmed independently by both an etymology reference and a general dictionary, which agree it referred specifically to training sparring rather than exercise in the broad sense. From there the meaning widened, and by 1922 “workout” was being used generally for any spell of strenuous physical exercise, the sense that now dominates everyday use of the phrase.