Meaning
Out of favour with someone, especially a person who has power over you: to be in the boss's black books is to have displeased them and to feel the consequences. The opposite state is being in their good books. Used across informal English but felt as especially British, and usually wry or half-joking rather than serious. Informal and usually humorous; it implies temporary disgrace, not permanent ruin. Regional use: General English; especially common in British usage.
Origin
A 'black book' was a generic name for an official register bound in black, and by the sixteenth century specifically a book recording names liable to censure or punishment. World Wide Words traces the literal family: the Black Book of the Exchequer (c. 1175), the Black Book of the Admiralty, and most famously the compilation of monastic abuses used to justify Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s; a 1726 account of Oxford University's proctor's 'black book', in which offenders were entered and barred from their degrees, shows the punitive sense in continuous use. The personal idiom grew out of that record-keeping, so the black originally described the binding, not the misdeeds; Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable already listed the figurative sense in its 1895 edition.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- in her black books
- in his black books
- in somebody's black books
- in someone's bad books
Usage Examples
- I put the whole team in the manager's black books by leaking the lineup.
- Ever since she returned the hire car with a dent, she has been in her father's black books.
- Tip generously at check-out if you want to stay out of the concierge's black books.