Meaning
A heavy burden of guilt, shame, or misfortune that someone cannot shake off, especially one created by their own actions. Usually said of a lasting liability - a debt, a scandal, a failed project - that drags on a person or organization and obstructs everything else they do. Often shortened to 'an albatross' ('the contract is an albatross'). It lands hardest when the burden stems from the bearer's own act, as in the poem. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The image comes from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, first published in 1798 in Lyrical Ballads. After the mariner shoots an albatross, his angry crew hangs the dead bird around his neck in place of a religious medal - 'Instead of the cross, the Albatross / About my neck was hung' - and it falls off only after he blesses the sea creatures, expiating his crime. The exact wording 'an albatross around his neck' never appears in the poem; the idiom is a later distillation of its central image. The bird's name itself entered English in the 1670s from Spanish and Portuguese, an alteration of alcatraz, and Etymonline dates the figurative burden sense of albatross by 1936, well over a century after the poem; none of the major references supplies an earlier dated figurative citation, so the path from poem to everyday idiom is thinly documented.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- an albatross about the neck
- an albatross around one's neck
- an albatross round your neck
Usage Examples
- That failed product launch became an albatross around the CEO's neck, dragging down every quarterly report for years.
- He resigned to escape the scandal, but the lawsuit followed him like an albatross around his neck.
- Her student debt is an albatross around her neck, ruling out travel, savings, and any thought of buying a home.