Fact or Folklore? Phrase origins
Where does “dead as a doornail” come from?
The short answer
Nobody has shown why a doornail counts as dead. What we can show is how old the phrase is. It’s in English verse by the 1370s, more than two hundred years before Shakespeare used it and more than four hundred and fifty before A Christmas Carol.
So Dickens didn’t invent it, and he never claimed to. In the book’s opening lines he admits he doesn’t know what is so dead about a door-nail.
The verdicts, claim by claim
- FOLKLORE
The story that Charles Dickens invented the phrase
In the video: “Dickens invented it.” False.
It’s in William of Palerne (before 1375), in Skeat’s 1867 edition, p. 29: centuries before 1843.
- FOLKLORE
The story that Shakespeare invented the phrase
In the video: “Shakespeare invented it.” False. The phrase is in print by the 1370s.
Same page: more than two hundred years before the 1594 printing.
- UNPROVEN
The clinched-nail story (a nail hammered over can’t be reused, so it’s “dead”)
In the video: “It’s dead because it was clinched.” Unproven.
Plausible, but no early writer says so.
- UNPROVEN
The door-knocker story (the nail was beaten to death)
In the video: “It’s dead because the knocker beat it.” Unproven.
The OED, as quoted by Grammarphobia, finds no evidence for it.
- UNPROVEN
Where the phrase comes from
In the video: Final verdict on where “dead as a doornail” comes from: unproven. What we can say is how old it is.
Unproven doesn’t mean false. It means nobody has shown it.
How we label. FACT: the record backs the story. FOLKLORE: a dated page we opened contradicts the story (it labels the story, never the phrase). UNPROVEN: could be true, can’t be shown. The videos use plainer words (solid, myth, false, plausible, rumour); each is shown here under one of these three labels.
How old is it?
A Christmas Carol (1843) opens with “Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.” Shakespeare has it too: in Henry VI, Part 2, printed in 1594, a character says “as dead as a doore nayle.” Both men borrowed it.
The oldest example we know of is in William Langland’s Piers Plowman, from around 1362: “Fey withouten fait is febelore than nought, and ded as a dore-nayl.” We haven’t opened an edition of that poem. The line and its date come from the Oxford English Dictionary, as quoted by Grammarphobia, so treat the date as the dictionary’s, not ours.
The next one we could check ourselves. William of Palerne, a romance about a werewolf, is dated to before 1375. In Walter Skeat’s 1867 edition for the Early English Text Society, page 29, line 628, a character says: “For but ich haue bote of mi bale bi a schort time, I am ded as dore-nail, now do al thi wille!” In plain English: unless I get relief from my misery soon, I’m dead as a doornail.
Why a doornail?
There are two popular answers. The first says carpenters drove a nail through a door and hammered the point flat on the other side, so it couldn’t be pulled out or used again. That’s called clinching. It’s tidy and plausible, but no early source says so. Grammarphobia looked for an OED citation for “dead-nailing” and didn’t find one.
The second says a doornail was the nail a door-knocker struck, beaten “to death” over the years. The OED, again as quoted by Grammarphobia, says there’s no evidence for that either.
Dickens didn’t know either, and said so: “Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail.” He adds that he’d have been inclined to regard a coffin-nail “as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade.”
Sources
- William of Palerne (before 1375), l. 628, ed. W. W. Skeat, Early English Text Society, 1867, p. 29. Page scan read. Internet Archive item romancewilliamp00skeagoog (digitized by Google; marked not in copyright). archive.org
- Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843), Stave I. Full text checked. Project Gutenberg eBook #46. gutenberg.org
- William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 2, IV.x (1594 quarto): “as dead as a doore nayle.” Quoted from the video’s source list; no scan linked here.
- William Langland, Piers Plowman, A-text, passus i, l. 161 (c. 1362), as transcribed by Grammarphobia, quoting the Oxford English Dictionary. We did not open an edition. Grammarphobia, “Dead as a doornail” (2011). grammarphobia.com
- The clinched-nail and knocker theories: Grammarphobia (above) and Etymonline, “doornail.” Online Etymology Dictionary. etymonline.com
Last checked: . Corrections: none yet.
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