Meaning
A person, group, or thing whose distress or failure gives the first warning of a danger that will soon threaten everyone else. Borrowed from miners who carried caged canaries underground, it is now used for early indicators of trouble in finance, public health, politics, technology, and the environment. Neutral register suited to journalism and science writing; it implies the warning sign itself suffers or perishes, so reserve it for genuine early warnings rather than any neutral indicator. Regional use: General English.
Origin
Rooted in a real safety practice. John Scott Haldane's research into mine gases led him in 1895 to propose taking small animals underground, because their faster breathing showed carbon monoxide poisoning before miners felt it; mice were used from about 1896 and canaries, whose collapse from the perch was easy to spot, from about 1900 - a practice documented in a Sheffield inquest report of December 1906 describing an expert taking 'a canary in a cage, a safety lamp, and an electric hand lamp' down a pit. British mines phased canaries out in favour of electronic gas detectors in 1986 and outlawed the practice outright in February 1996. Figurative use came slowly: a North Carolina paper drew the comparison as early as 1915 ('A Chautauqua is to a town what a canary is to a coal mine'), and the Albuquerque Journal applied the exact wording to trout as an environmental sentinel in September 1964, but the idiom only became common late in the twentieth century.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- canary in a coal mine
- canary in the mine
- climate canary
Usage Examples
- Melting glaciers are the canary in the coal mine, giving us the clearest early warning of a fast-warming planet.
- When small lenders began to fail, regulators should have treated them as the canary in the coal mine.
- Coral reefs bleach first; they are the ocean's canary in the coal mine whenever the water grows dangerously warm.