Meaning
To treat a trivial problem as though it were a serious one, exaggerating its importance out of all proportion. It is nearly always a rebuke to someone fussing over a minor difficulty, and often appears as the advice not to do so. Informal and mildly critical; it accuses the other person of overreaction, so it rarely sounds neutral. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The earliest recorded use is generally given as 1548, in Nicholas Udall's translation of Erasmus ('The Sophistes of Grece coulde through their copiousness make an Elephant of a flye, and a mountaine of a mollehill'), where the new English pairing sits beside the older Latin proverb elephantem ex musca facere, making an elephant out of a fly, which Erasmus had recorded in his Adagia; Wikipedia credits Udall himself with the mountain-and-molehill pairing. Etymonline instead dates the idiom to the 1560s and cites John Foxe's Acts and Monuments (1570), 'makyng mountaines of Molehils'. The word molehill itself is only mid-15th century, so the joke could not in any case be much older than Udall. The image is exact: the modest heap of earth a mole throws up, inflated into a mountain.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a mountain from a molehill
- make a mountain of a molehill
- molehill into a mountain
- turn a molehill into a mountain
Usage Examples
- The leaked memo contained one mildly rude sentence, but the commentary made a mountain out of a molehill.
- She warned her team not to make mountains out of molehills every time a client asked for small changes.
- Making a mountain out of a molehill, the board spent three meetings debating the font on the new letterhead.