Meaning
A prediction that people will be punished, dismissed from their posts, or forced to resign after a public failure or scandal, usually inside an organisation. No literal execution is intended today, and the tone is often journalistic, melodramatic, or half-humorous. Informal and journalistic; frequently exaggerated or ironic in office politics. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The imagery is execution: a head severed by axe or guillotine rolling away. The Phrase Finder's research finds the earliest known print use in an American newspaper, the Indiana Herald of January 1858, during the Lecompton Constitution controversy, with official heads rolling 'on the ground'; notably that first use evokes the axe rather than the guillotine. The expression became widespread through press reporting of Adolf Hitler's September 1930 testimony, rendered in the British Daily Herald as a threat that 'decapitated heads will roll in the sand'; newspapers of the era wrongly assumed he had coined it. Etymonline likewise dates the English phrase to 1930 and describes it as a translation of Hitler's German. The purely figurative sense, meaning dismissals rather than deaths, appears in print from the 1940s in American newspapers such as the Dayton Herald (May 1944). A chain through Italian or Mussolini-era statements is sometimes asserted but no documented link appears in the sources.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- heads are going to roll
- heads rolled
- heads should roll
- some heads will roll
Usage Examples
- When the audit reveals who approved those payments, heads will roll.
- Heads rolled at the shipping firm after the data breach made the newspapers.
- She warned that if the deadline slipped again, heads would roll in the engineering department.