Time idioms: Phrazle Time

Idioms about time

This category is about phrases that deal with time in all its forms: hours and minutes, days and nights, seasons and years, clocks and calendars, and the ideas of being early, late, quick, patient or too slow. Many of them give advice, such as acting now rather than later, or waiting calmly for things to improve. Others simply describe how time feels, quick when you are busy and slow when you are waiting.

Every language has time idioms, because every life is limited by it. English took some of its sayings from Latin writers, some from farm life, where seasons and daylight set the rhythm of work, and some from the clocks, trains and timetables of the industrial age.

All puzzles on this page are time phrases. Words such as TIME, DAY, HOUR, NOW, LATE and NIGHT are good candidates when the word lengths fit.

Time idioms and what they mean

None of these examples is used as a puzzle, so reading them will not spoil a game.

• Don't put off until tomorrow what you can do today: do a task now instead of delaying it. It was common advice in the 1700s, when Lord Chesterfield passed it on in letters to his son.
• Procrastination is the thief of time: putting things off wastes the time you have. The line comes from Edward Young's long poem Night Thoughts, published in the 1740s.
• Better three hours too soon than a minute too late: it is wiser to be very early than slightly late. The line comes from Shakespeare's play The Merry Wives of Windsor.
• The darkest hour is just before the dawn: things often seem worst just before they start to improve. The English writer Thomas Fuller put a version of it in print in 1650.
• Deadline: the latest time by which something must be done. During the American Civil War, a deadline was a line around a prison camp that prisoners were forbidden to cross; the word later came to mean a time limit, first in newspaper offices.
• Old-timer: a person who has lived or worked somewhere for a long time. It is often said with warmth, about someone who remembers how things used to be.
• Fortnight: a period of two weeks. The word is a shortened form of the Old English for "fourteen nights", and it is still common in British English.
• Yesteryear: the past, especially as remembered fondly. The poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti coined it in 1870 for his translation of a French poem asking where the snows of the past have gone.

Time idioms FAQ