Meaning
To abandon someone to face trouble, criticism or punishment alone, especially after they had good reason to expect backing, often with blame shifted onto them in the process. Common in political, corporate and journalistic talk of scapegoats and deserted subordinates. Informal and accusatory; it nearly always implies betrayal or unfairness by whoever does the hanging. Regional use: American English origin; now General English.
Origin
An American colloquialism built on the image of wet washing pegged on a line and left exposed to the wind and sun. Word Histories, which assembles the early newspaper record, finds the first known examples in mid-1940s American sports pages: the earliest is the Camden, New Jersey Evening Courier of 23 April 1945, reporting that a baseball team 'has been hung out to dry' for the sixth straight game. The earliest citations cluster around baseball and football, several pair the phrase with 'put through the wringer', another laundry image, and a 1948 film review writes of actors 'hung out to dry on the studio clothesline', making the metaphor explicit. From sport it spread to politics and general American usage, and later to other varieties of English. Grammarist claims some 19th-century use but dates the idiom's real traction in print to the mid-20th century, while Word Histories' earliest documented example remains 1945, so the 1940s sports pages are the safest anchor.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- be hung out to dry
- hang someone out to dry
- leave someone out to dry
- left hanging out to dry
Usage Examples
- When the expenses story broke, the minister hung her private secretary out to dry rather than admit the claims were her own.
- The two junior traders were hung out to dry while the directors who approved the trades kept their bonuses.
- Allies complained that Washington had left the local militias out to dry once the fighting moved on.