Meaning
To rescue someone - usually yourself, sometimes another person - from danger, failure, punishment or disaster, often at the last possible moment. In the old phrase bacon is slang for the human body, and by extension one's life or skin, so saving your bacon belongs to the same family as saving your neck, your hide or your skin. Do not confuse with bring home the bacon, already catalogued on this site in the money theme - a different bacon idiom about earning a living. The 1654 date rests on Ammer; the OED's own citation list for the phrase sits behind its paywall. Regional use: Earliest recorded in British sources; now common in British, American and Australian English.
Origin
The word is ancient but the metaphor is no longer obvious. The OED's factsheet gives earliest evidence for the noun bacon from around 1330, and Etymonline traces it to the early fourteenth century, from Old French and a Germanic root meaning back meat. For the idiom itself, Ammer's American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms records it from 1654 - verified on the Farlex page - and concedes the allusion is no longer clear, suggesting it may simply be a comical way of referring to one's body or one's life, and noting that in 1654 bacon was a prized commodity, so saving it meant keeping something precious. Wiktionary's earliest quotation is W. H. G. Kingston, The Three Commanders (1876): the crew 'thought it as well to save their bacon'. Ammer groups it with save one's skin (early 1500s) and save one's neck (late 1600s).
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- save one's bacon
- save someone's bacon
- saved my bacon
Usage Examples
- Thanks for bringing the spare projector - you really saved my bacon ten minutes before the keynote.
- The substitute goalkeeper saved the team's bacon with a double save in stoppage time.
- He threw the documents on the fire to save his bacon when the officers knocked.