Meaning
Slightly unwell, or in low spirits and out of humour; not quite oneself. The phrase straddles body and mood: someone out of sorts may be mildly ill, irritable, or both at once, and it covers everything from a below-par morning to vague disgruntlement with life. Sorts here means condition or spirits, not categories or kinds. Now usually about mood or mild sickness; common frames are be, feel or get out of sorts, and out of sorts with someone or something. The typesetting explanation circulates widely but the evidence for it is, in the Phrase Finder's words, non-existent: the phrase predates any recorded use of sorts for type. Regional use: All English varieties.
Origin
The record undercuts the popular printers' tale. It is true that typographers called pieces of type sorts - the Phrase Finder dates that use to 1668 and quotes Joseph Moxon's Mechanick Exercises of 1683, verified on the fetched page - but the idiom itself is older: Etymonline dates out of sorts, not in usual good condition, to the 1620s, its original citation paired with out of tune, and Ammer's American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms also says early 1600s. The earliest OED example of the phrase applied to type is as late as 1784 (Benjamin Franklin, on fonts strangely out of sorts), which Michael Quinion at World Wide Words reads as an established idiom being borrowed by the trade, not coined by it - he traces sort to Latin sors, lot or condition, its first English meaning in the thirteenth century. Out of sorts thus most plausibly means out of one's usual condition or spirits, and the typesetting origin story is debunked.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- be a bit out of sorts
- feel out of sorts
- out of sorts with someone
Usage Examples
- She has been out of sorts all week - not ill exactly, just not herself.
- Sorry for snapping at you; I woke up out of sorts.
- The whole team seemed out of sorts after the long flight.