Meaning
Feeling sharp fear, dread, or suspense. The idiom refers to the pounding, rising sensation in the chest and throat that danger or high suspense produces, naming a moment of acute alarm rather than a lasting state of anxiety. Neutral to informal; emphasizes sudden, intense apprehension, often in suspenseful moments. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The OED documents to have one's heart in one's mouth and its variants from 1548, defining it as being extremely apprehensive or alarmed. The earliest citation is Nicholas Udall's translation of Erasmus's paraphrase of Luke, with the hearts of the disciples at their very mouth for fear, and the phrase was later used by Addison in 1715 and Richardson in Pamela in 1740. It belongs to an old family of heart-displacement metaphors: its opposite, one's heart in one's boots, is recorded from about 1450, and a writer in 1674 already glossed the expression physically, connecting it to the stomach's rising under sudden fright. Claims that the idiom descends from Homeric descriptions of the heart leaping to the throat are sometimes repeated, but none of the standard references consulted substantiates them, so the documented English history should be treated as starting in 1548.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- heart in one's mouth
- heart in your throat
- my heart leapt into my mouth
- your heart is in your mouth
Usage Examples
- My heart was in my mouth as the gymnast released the bar for the final flip.
- Watching the toddler stray toward the pool edge, every parent's heart is in their mouth.
- With his heart in his mouth, he opened the envelope from the university.