Meaning
In an angry, combative mood and actively looking for a confrontation. The phrase describes someone on the hunt for an argument or a reckoning - a manager storming between departments, a customer demanding satisfaction - and it can be wry as easily as menacing. Now almost always figurative and often humorous; 'Dad's on the warpath about the garage' needs no frontier gloss. Regional use: General English (North American frontier origin).
Origin
A direct adoption from Native American usage: the 'war path' was the route a war party travelled into enemy territory, sometimes called the 'warrior's path'. English print records begin in the eighteenth century - a 1755 map, cited by Metcalf and Barnhart's America in So Many Words (1997), refers to 'the Crossing of the War Path', though those authors name no source for it - and the earliest citation The Phrase Finder can verify is James Adair's History of the American Indians (1775): 'I often have rode that war path alone'. William Burton's Cyclopaedia of Wit and Humor (1859) shows the figurative turn beginning, comparing critics who 'come out on the war path' and scalp their man, and Mark Twain completes it in A Tramp Abroad (1880): 'She was on the war path all the evening.' American Heritage dates the hyperbolic spoiling-for-a-fight sense to the late 1800s, since when the frontier setting has fallen away entirely.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- be on the warpath
- go on the warpath
- war path (original two-word form)
- warpath
Usage Examples
- The head of procurement was on the warpath after discovering the duplicate invoices.
- When the sawn-down hedge came to light, the whole residents' committee went on the warpath.
- You could tell from her silence at breakfast that Mum was on the warpath about the kitchen.