Meaning
Extremely small, and by extension extremely young. In practice it almost always describes someone as they were in early childhood, as in 'I've known him since he was knee-high to a grasshopper' - that is, since he was a small child. Nearly always tied to age or memory ('since I was...'), not to an adult's current height. Hyphenate the whole phrase when it stands before a noun. Regional use: American English, now widely understood elsewhere.
Origin
American. The grasshopper is the survivor of a swarm of nineteenth-century hyperbolic comparisons. Etymonline records knee-high used literally from 1743 and the grasshopper phrase by 1835, calling it one of a rash of knee-high phrases from the US South and West applied to children - alongside toad (1831), frog and duck (1833), junebug (1835), and mosquito (1837). Idiomation traces an earlier 'knee high to a toad' to New Hampshire's Portsmouth Oracle of 1814 and lists further variants, with its earliest clear grasshopper citation in the Democratic Review of 1851; Grammarist likewise puts the grasshopper form around 1850, after which it became the standard version. The sources conflict on first dates - grasshopper 1835 versus 1851, toad 1814 versus 1831 - which itself shows how shaky early dating of colloquial phrases can be.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- knee-high to a frog
- knee-high to a mosquito
- knee-high to a toad
Usage Examples
- Grandpa claims he has fished that same river since he was knee-high to a grasshopper.
- The bakery has stood on Main Street since today's councillors were knee-high to a grasshopper.
- She started judo when she was knee-high to a grasshopper and now coaches the county squad.