Meaning
A person's first experience of a severe ordeal, classically a soldier's first time under fire in battle; by extension any demanding initiation into a tough job, role, or situation. The variant 'baptism by fire' is equally standard and interchangeable. Neutral to dramatic; stresses the severity of the initiation rather than its outcome. Regional use: General English (French military phrase adopted).
Origin
Two strands feed the phrase and they are probably independent. The older is religious: 'baptism of fire' originally meant either martyrdom by burning or the grace of the Holy Spirit, from Matthew 3:11, 'he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire'; that sense has largely died out. The military sense entered English from French: the Oxford English Dictionary's earliest evidence is 'le bapteme du fer', baptism of iron, quoted in O'Meara's Napoleon in Exile (1822), which strictly records the idea rather than the English wording. The first printing of the English phrase cited by the same source is George Lawrence's novel Guy Livingstone (1857). A popular story credits Napoleon with coining the expression about his troops at Toulon in 1793, but the documented record found here does not support that attribution, and the link between the religious and military strands is likewise described as unclear.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- baptism by fire
- baptism of iron
- fiery baptism
Usage Examples
- Her baptism of fire came in the second week, when the data migration failed live on a customer's trading floor.
- The regiment's newest lieutenants received their baptism of fire on the ridge that first terrible morning.
- Teaching a class of forty teenagers on day one was a baptism of fire he never forgot.