Meaning
Said to reassure someone that a very unusual misfortune, or a fluke piece of luck, is unlikely to happen again in the same place or to the same person. A shortened form of the fuller proverbial saying; scientifically false, since lightning frequently hits the same spot repeatedly, and the inverted form 'lightning does strike twice' is often used to argue the opposite. Conversational and proverbial; used for reassurance about bad luck, or ironically about unlikely repeats of good fortune. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The full form is 'lightning never strikes twice in the same place'. The earliest commonly cited print appearance is American: P. Hamilton Myers's novel Thrilling Adventures of the Prisoner of the Border (1860), whose hero, dodging cannon fire, jokes 'Lightning never strikes twice in the same place, nor cannon balls either, I presume', a line verifiable in the Internet Archive scan of the 1860 edition. An early variant turns up in Mary Roberts Rinehart's mystery The Man in Lower Ten (1909): 'ghosts are like lightning; they never strike twice in the same night'. The documented 19th-century life of the proverb is American, though it is now general English. Its premise is meteorologically wrong, as Britannica notes, because tall structures are struck over and over; that falsity has itself become productive, feeding the counter-proverb and routine journalistic debunkings. Nothing earlier than 1860 is documented in the sources consulted.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- lightning doesn't strike twice
- lightning never strikes the same place twice
- lightning never strikes twice in the same place
Usage Examples
- Relax about the trip; we were robbed in Lisbon once, and they say lightning never strikes twice.
- Columnists liked to say lightning never strikes twice, until the town flooded for the second spring running.
- She joked that lightning never strikes twice as she accepted her second literary prize in three years.