Meaning
An ingrained sense of grievance or inferiority that makes someone defensive and quick to take offence, often seeming to invite confrontation. Typically 'have a chip on your shoulder' or 'with a chip on his shoulder'. Informal and mildly judgemental; it diagnoses an attitude in someone, so use with care in direct address. Regional use: General English (American origin).
Origin
The Phrase Finder and the OED both trace the phrase to the United States. In the early 19th century, a person spoiling for a fight would literally carry a chip of wood on the shoulder and dare anyone to knock it off: the custom is attested in James Kirke Paulding's Letters from the South (1817, as 'knocking a chip off the shoulder') and described in New York's Long-Island Telegraph of May 1830. The figurative use developed later; the OED Supplement's earliest citation is from 1890, and the first known figurative use by an English writer is in Somerset Maugham's Gentlemen in the Parlour (1930s). A competing theory points to 18th-century Royal Dockyards, where shipwrights had a right to carry surplus timber 'chips' home on their shoulders (restricted by orders of 1753, contributing to a 1756 strike); documented accounts of the strike are literal, and since the figurative phrase is not recorded in England until the 1930s - a gap of nearly two centuries - this explanation is generally doubted.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- carry a chip on your shoulder
- chip on her shoulder
- chip on his shoulder
Usage Examples
- He has had a chip on his shoulder about private schools since his own application was rejected.
- Going into the debate with a chip on your shoulder makes it harder to win over the undecided.
- Rather than nursing a chip on her shoulder, she channelled the snub into training harder.