Meaning
To remain cheerful, courageous, and hopeful in the face of difficulty, rejection, or discouragement; most often spoken as encouragement to someone who is struggling. The shortened exhortation 'chin up!' is equally common. Warm, encouraging tone; very common as a standalone exhortation ('Chin up!'). Regional use: General English; British counterpart 'keep your pecker up'.
Origin
The expression is American and emerged around the turn of the twentieth century: Grammarist describes it as distinctly American from the late 1800s to early 1900s, and cites an early printed example in the Pennsylvania newspaper The Evening Democrat in 1900 ('Keep your chin up. Don't take your troubles to bed with you'). Merriam-Webster dates the related noun 'chin-up' (the exercise) to 1918. A British cousin, 'keep your pecker up', is older: The Phrase Finder's earliest citation is The Times of September 1845, where 'pecker' means a bird's beak (or by extension the nose), the image being a lively bird holding its head high. It is a reasonable but unproven inference that the American 'chin up' replaced or paralleled the British phrase, since 'pecker' had acquired an obscene sense in American slang that made the older expression unusable there.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- chin up
- hold your chin up
- keep one's chin up
- keep your pecker up (British counterpart)
Usage Examples
- Losing the final hurt, but keep your chin up - there is always next season.
- Her father kept his chin up through months of treatment, reassuring everyone who visited.
- The coach told the young squad to keep their chins up after the defeat.