Meaning
To sense or believe something instinctively, with strong conviction but no evidence you can point to. Typically said of intuitions that something will happen or is true - about weather, illness, trouble ahead, or a hunch about a person or decision - and it concedes that the feeling cannot be argued from facts. Informal to neutral; signals instinct rather than evidence, so it invites gentle skepticism. Regional use: General English.
Origin
Etymonline dates to feel (something) in one's bones, meaning to have a presentiment, to 1867 in American English. The image treats the bones as the body's seat of deep, unreasoning knowledge: a conviction too deep or too diffuse to be conscious is imagined as registered in the skeleton itself, a notion reinforced by everyday aches in joints and old injuries that seem to anticipate weather. No specific coinage or author is recorded; the phrase appears to have crystallized in nineteenth-century American usage and then spread into general English.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- feel it in my bones
- feel something in your bones
- know it in your bones
- sense it in your bones
Usage Examples
- I know the trail looks safe on paper, but I feel it in my bones that we should turn back before the pass.
- Grandmother always said her knee told her rain was coming - she felt it in her bones.
- He could not explain why, but he felt in his bones that the merger would fall through.