Meaning
Restlessness, irritability, and low mood caused by being cooped up indoors or stuck in one place for too long, especially during a long winter or other enforced confinement. A casual, self-diagnosing term rather than a clinical one, it usually implies that the sufferer badly needs to get out and see other people. Informal and usually lighthearted, though it can describe genuine distress from prolonged isolation. Regional use: General English; originated as an Americanism.
Origin
An Americanism of the early twentieth century: Random House dates it to 1915-20, and the earliest quotation commonly cited is from B. M. Bower's 1918 novel Cabin Fever, which names 'the insidious mental ailment which the West calls cabin fever'. The popular image behind it is of settlers snowed into a log cabin through a frontier winter, which fits the novel's western setting, but this is the documented populariser rather than a verified first use. A separate, now obsolete sense meaning typhus appears as early as 1820 ('the low typhus or cabin fever' reported from Ireland) and is unrelated to the modern isolation sense. Stories crediting railway crews or lumber camps with the phrase circulate, but they are not documented in the standard references checked.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a bad case of cabin fever
- a touch of cabin fever
- get cabin fever
- suffer from cabin fever
Usage Examples
- By late February the whole household had cabin fever and was snapping at each other over dinner.
- Three straight weeks of working from home gave me a serious case of cabin fever.
- The kids get cabin fever whenever rain traps them indoors for more than a day.