Meaning
A romantic meeting arranged between two strangers - typically by a matchmaking friend or relative, briefly, in public, with both parties flying on instruments. The phrase also names the unknown partner. Light, situational, faintly comic; the phrase carries the arranger's optimism and the participants' ambulance-call tone in equal measure. Regional use: General English; American origin.
Origin
American slang of the early twenties, and the record catches it in the act: coined in 1921 for the meeting itself, extended by 1925 to the person, and glossed in a 1922 newspaper's Vocabulary of Jazzdom - 'Blind date - when parties do not know each other' - the jazz-age glossary proving the term arrived with the era's new freedoms. The parts are transparent: blind, done without knowledge of certain facts, plus date, the social engagement, itself a recent Americanism then. The practice is older and wider than the phrase - matchmaking is ancient, and one tradition traces such arranged introductions to nineteenth-century Eastern European Jewish communities - and the etiquette has barely changed: neutral ground, a fixed hour, an escape window, and an account to the arranger afterwards.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a blind date with
- double-blind date
- set up on a blind date
Usage Examples
- The blind date went so well that the arranger has never been allowed to forget it.
- Forty years on, they still disagree, at parties, about which of them was the blind date.
- Her aunt arranged four blind dates that summer; two couples still send the aunt cards.