Meaning
Pressed tightly together in a cramped space with no room to move comfortably, typically of people in a train, lift, room or vehicle. The comparison is with small fish tightly packed into tins, and the phrase is almost always a complaint about crowding. Informal and virtually always negative, voicing discomfort at crowding. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The image comes from the canning trade rather than from fresh fish: small oily fish were packed nose-to-tail into tins with oil, and, as a Century Dictionary note quoted by Etymonline explains, packers filled the boxes as closely as possible with fish because the oil was worth more than the fish. Etymonline records the simile by 1845 and the derived verb sardine, to pack closely, by 1895. Wikipedia's article on the fish traces an 1841 use, 'packed up like sardines', in The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, itself a rendering of the French encaisses comme des sardines from an 1829 novel, followed by 'like sardines in a tin-box' in 1845 and 'in a can' in 1854. The tinning imagery is therefore secure; whether the English phrase is a direct calque of the French simile or an independent development of the same trade image is less certain.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- crammed like sardines
- packed in like sardines
- packed like sardines in a tin
- squashed in like sardines
Usage Examples
- By the second stop the train was so full that we stood packed like sardines all the way to the terminus.
- Two hundred people were crammed into a hall built for eighty, and everyone left complaining about feeling packed like sardines.
- On match days the visiting fans are packed like sardines into the away end, singing regardless.