Meaning
In perfect health or peak condition; 'she's in the pink of health' means she is thoroughly well. The now-standard health sense is a narrowing of an older use in which the pink of something was its acme - the pink of fashion, of courtesy, of condition - so the phrase can still be applied to anything at its best. Warm, slightly quaint or jocular register; almost always about wellbeing unless deliberately archaic. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The 'pink' here is not primarily the colour but an older noun sense, 'the finest example; the height', already used by Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet (1597): 'I am the very pinke of curtesie'. The Phrase Finder traces this excellence sense to the Dianthus flowers called pinks, admired in the Elizabethan era, and wordhistories.net documents the flower word from 1566 - its name perhaps from Dutch pinck-ooghen, 'little eye', or from the verb 'to pink', to cut, for the jagged petals - while the colour word 'pink' only appears in 1607, after the excellence sense was established. The full phrase is cited by The Phrase Finder from 1720, in Leigh's Kensington Gardens ('the Pink of the Mode', the height of fashion), and the narrowed health sense from around 1900, with the Kynoch Journal of 1905 printing 'in the pink of condition'. The hunting-pink coat and a tailor named Thomas Pink are folk etymology with no record behind them.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- in the pink of condition
- the pink of perfection
- the very pink of (something)
Usage Examples
- At ninety-one he is still in the pink of health and walks the coast path daily.
- The mare looked in the pink after a winter at grass.
- The band returned from hiatus in the pink of form, playing better than in the 1990s.