Meaning
Said of someone who repeats the same point, complaint, or request over and over until listeners are worn down. The comparison is to a vinyl record so scratched or damaged that the needle sticks in one groove and replays the same snippet endlessly. Informal with a mildly exasperated tone. The metaphor is increasingly dated for audiences who never used vinyl, though it remains current. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The mechanics are documented in Wikipedia's gramophone article: a scratch or dust can make the needle skip or jump backward into a locked groove that repeats over and over, which the article calls the origin of like a broken record and like a scratched record. Grammarist dates the expression sound like a broken record to 1940, roughly six decades after Edison's 1877 phonograph made recorded sound everyday, fitting the idiom's mid-century, vinyl-era rise. Pedants note the wording is technically off, since a truly broken record cannot play at all; the repeating culprit is really a scratched or damaged disc, but the phrasing stuck. Cambridge marks be or sound like a broken record as an informal way to say the same thing many times, and as vinyl gives way to digital formats the literal reference has grown fuzzy for younger speakers even as nostalgia keeps the expression current.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- be like a broken record
- like a scratched record
- sound like a broken record
Usage Examples
- I know I sound like a broken record, but the form still needs a signature before anything can ship.
- Mom is a broken record about locking the back door; we can now recite the lecture from memory.
- The pundit keeps repeating the same three statistics like a scratched record all afternoon.