Meaning
Completely safe, secure, or certain of success, said especially of investments, savings, or plans that carry no apparent risk. A chiefly British simile, most often met in the fuller form 'as safe as houses', and now applied to almost anything judged reliably secure. British and somewhat cosy or old-fashioned; frequently used ironically when safety proves illusory. Regional use: British English.
Origin
British. The Phrase Finder's earliest print example of 'safe as houses' is the London melodrama Timour the Tartar, staged from around 1842, whose 1850 text promises a life 'shall be safe as houses'. Wiktionary cites the singular 'as safe as a house' from an 1808 House of Commons report, with plural citations from 1859 (Kinahan Cornwallis) and Thomas Hardy in 1874. The derivation is genuinely unsettled: it is widely believed to contrast the security of investing in housing with the railway shares that ruined speculators in the mania of the 1840s, and Wiktionary still derives it from the investment value of property, but the Phrase Finder argues this is unlikely, noting that in the earliest uses 'safe' meant 'certainly, undoubtedly', as in Friswell's Out & About (1860): 'You're booked, safe as houses'. On that view 'houses' served simply as a byword for solidity and certainty.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- as safe as a house
- as safe as houses
- as safe as the Bank of England
Usage Examples
- With a government guarantee behind it, the bond is as safe as houses.
- He called the family recipe safe as houses: same ingredients, same result, fifty years running.
- Parking there is safe as houses at that hour, and the walk is under a minute.