/ði ˈɜːli ˈbɜːd ˈkætʃɪz ðə ˈwɜːm/
English idiom, everyday. People who get up or get started early are the ones who get the best chances.
Draft Not yet checked by a native English speaker.
How do people use The early bird catches the worm
?
A proverb, so it’s usually quoted whole, often as a nudge to get out of bed or to get in line before everyone else. Americans tend to say “gets the worm”, and both versions are common in Britain. People also shorten it to the noun: an “early bird” is someone who’s up before everyone else, and an “early bird discount” rewards people who book first.
Also said the early bird gets the worm, it’s the early bird that gets the worm
The early bird catches the worm
in real sentences
-
The early bird catches the worm.
Tatoeba, sentence by al_ex_an_der, CC BY 2.0 FR
-
The early bird gets the worm.
Tatoeba, sentence by darinmex, CC BY 2.0 FR
Where does The early bird catches the worm
come from?
The sources checked here don’t give a date for the first use. English Wiktionary files “catches the worm” as a variant of “gets the worm” and points to Gregory Titelman’s Random House Dictionary of Popular Proverbs and Sayings (1996), and Wikiquote lists it from Martin Manser’s Facts on File Dictionary of Proverbs (2007), but neither gives an origin. The idea is old in English: Phrase Finder traces the related “early to bed and early to rise” to John Clarke’s proverb collection of 1639, with a similar saying printed in 1486.
Mistakes learners make with The early bird catches the worm
Mixing up the proverb and the noun. “She’s an early bird” describes a person, while “the early bird catches the worm” is advice, so “she’s an early bird catches the worm” doesn’t work.
Other English idioms like The early bird catches the worm
Spot a mistake in The early bird catches the worm
?
Send a correction, or a sentence you’d actually say with it. Everything is read before anything on this page changes.