Meaning
Completely crazy or wildly eccentric, usually in a lively, harmless way rather than a threatening one. The simile is old-fashioned and more literary or humorous than contemporary slang, and many present-day readers meet it through Lewis Carroll's tea-party character. Whimsical and faintly literary today, sounding affectionate or antiquated rather than clinical. Regional use: General English.
Origin
Hares behave with startling energy in March, at the start of their breeding season, boxing, chasing and leaping in open fields, which made them look deranged to country observers. The simile is very old: the earliest known use is in the anonymous poem Colyn Blowbols Testament (c. 1500), where drunken men become 'as braynles as a Marshe hare'. John Skelton used the comparison several times, positively as 'mery as a Marche hare' and negatively as mad, and Thomas More wrote in 1529 of someone not as mad as a March hare but as a mad dog; Etymonline attests the expression from the 1520s and links it to the breeding season. Lewis Carroll drew on the proverb for his March Hare in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), through whom many readers now know it. A claim that 'March hare' is really a corruption of 'marsh hare' is a modern invention, traced by Word Histories to an 1877 appendix and wrongly credited to Erasmus.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- as mad as a March hare
- mad as a hatter (often used interchangeably)
- merry as a March hare
Usage Examples
- 'This timetable is mad as a March hare,' the engineer said, 'and yet it has run on time for three seasons.'
- Cheerfully describing herself as being as mad as a March hare, she signed up for the winter swim before breakfast.
- The committee's plan, mad as a March hare by the treasurer's account, somehow survived every audit.