Meaning
A pairing of two people, or by extension two things, that is perfectly suited or unusually successful. Originally said of marriages, it now describes any winning combination, from business partners to food pairings, with a tone of admiration or play: the union seems fated rather than merely fortunate. Almost always with the article and the verb 'be' or 'seem'. Extends freely beyond romance to food, business, sport and politics; 'a match made in hell' is the ironic antonym. The Swift, Dickens and Beale quotations were all verified verbatim on Wikisource and Wiktionary. Regional use: Common in British and American English and throughout the English-speaking world.
Origin
The exact phrase is first cited in Anne Beale's novel Gladys, the Reaper (1860), which says of an ill-assorted couple that theirs was actually one of the 'Matches made in heaven' (Wiktionary). It grew out of the much older proverb 'marriages are made in heaven', already a stock saying when Jonathan Swift mocked it in Polite Conversation ('They say, marriages are made in Heaven'), and reflecting the biblical view of marriage, 'What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder' (Matthew 19:6, King James). The match wording was equally current through the 1800s: Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39) has 'Matches are made in Heaven, they say', and Melville's story I and My Chimney (1856) treats 'matches are made in heaven' as common wisdom. Web pages sometimes credit Shakespeare, but no verifiable print record supports that; the evidence points to a 19th-century coinage built on an older proverb. Farlex's idiom guide glosses the modern sense as an extremely well-suited pairing of people or things.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a marriage made in heaven
- matches made in heaven
Usage Examples
- Everyone said the pairing of the young conductor with the veteran orchestra was a match made in heaven.
- Peanut butter and pickle sandwiches sound strange, but for some people they are a match made in heaven.
- The merger looked like a match made in heaven until the two boards actually met.