Meaning
An act of betrayal by someone trusted, such as a friend, ally, or colleague; a treacherous deed carried out from a position of confidence rather than in open confrontation. Now standard in political and workplace talk for disloyalty, and in the verb form 'to stab someone in the back'. Strongly negative and personal; in historical writing about Weimar Germany it carries heavy political and antisemitic baggage. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The verb 'stab' is recorded from the late 14th century, and English writers had long described wounds 'given treacherously' before the fixed phrase emerged. The Online Etymology Dictionary attests the noun phrase in its figurative sense of a 'treacherous deed' by 1881, with the verbal phrase following by 1888 (the agent noun 'backstabber' is dated to 1839). The expression then took on a charged political life after the First World War, when German nationalists falsely claimed the undefeated army had been betrayed by civilians, Jews, socialists, and communists - the antisemitic Dolchstosslegende, or stab-in-the-back myth, most famously spread by Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg in 1919 testimony. The English calque 'stab-in-the-back' retains that association in phrases like 'stab-in-the-back narrative', which historians use for comparable betrayal myths.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a knife in the back
- backstab
- stab someone in the back
- stab-in-the-back narrative
Usage Examples
- Learning that her deputy had briefed against her for months felt like a stab in the back.
- The party treated the coalition deal as a stab in the back by its former partners.
- He was furious when a colleague he had mentored stabbed him in the back over the promotion.