Where did the phrase "back to the grind" come from?
The "grind" has been wearing people down since the 19th century.
If you get "back to the grind", you return to work or your regular routine, especially after a long break or vacation. The expression often carries an added suggestion: The work waiting for you is unwanted, unpleasant or monotonously exhausting.
But what exactly is the "grind", and why do we go back to it?
"Grind" Started as College Slang
Oddly for such a modern-sounding expression, the roots of "back to the grind" date to the mid-1800s. Around that time, grind began to be used as a noun meaning hard work or labor — a sense that appears to have emerged in American college slang.
The Oxford English Dictionary's earliest record of this meaning dates from 1851, when American author and historian Benjamin Homer Hall included grind in A Collection of College Words and Customs. He defined it as "an oppressive action".
"Students speak of a very long lesson which they are required to learn", Hall explained, "or of anything which is very unpleasant or difficult to perform as a grind".
Hall must have encountered enough examples to consider the term well established in student speech by the time his book appeared. Slang lexicographer Jonathan Green has since found a slightly earlier example in a poem written at Harvard in 1850.
But why describe a tiring and oppressive period of work as a grind? Hall offered an explanation for that too. The meaning, he wrote, came from the verb to grind in the sense of "to harass" or "to afflict".
This figurative use developed from the same verb used for grinding grain and had been part of the language since medieval times.
How the "Grind" Left the Classroom
After emerging in mid-19th-century America, this sense of grind soon reached the UK. English author Thomas Hughes used it in his 1859 novel Tom Brown at Oxford, the sequel to his much better-known Tom Brown's School Days, published in 1857.
Written evidence suggests that the term remained largely confined to college and university speech until the late 19th century. During this period, a "grind" could also refer to an especially hardworking student.
By the end of the Victorian era, however, the word had spread into wider slang on both sides of the Atlantic.
The word remained in use throughout the 20th century. The first known reference to specifically getting "back to the grind" — that is, returning to work — dates from the 1980s.
The complete expression may be relatively recent, but the exhausting idea behind the "grind" is centuries old.