Weather sayings
What does “under the weather” mean?
Your weather right now
Looking out of your window…
Live from OpenWeatherMap.
[ Advertisement ]
Advertisement
Feeling a bit off: not properly ill, just not right. It is the polite way to say you would rather be on the sofa.
“I’m a bit under the weather, so I’m giving tonight a miss.”
Get roasted by your own forecastFree, no account, and you pick how rude I get.
Where it comes from
Nobody knows for sure. The popular story is nautical, about sailors going below the weather deck when they felt rough, but nobody has found it used that way at sea. The earliest printed examples, from American newspapers in the 1820s, use it for any kind of trouble, not just feeling ill.
[ Advertisement ]
Advertisement
What I think of “under the weather”
Under the weather: the only forecast where the weather is fine and you are not.
Technically everyone is under the weather. Some of us just feel it more.
Being under the weather is how the sky gets you without a single cloud.
More weather sayings
Sources: Mental Floss on the phrase’s 1820s newspaper uses and the unproven nautical theory.