Meaning
Describes people who meet only briefly by chance and then part forever, never seeing each other again; often said of a fleeting encounter that seemed to promise more, as when two travellers hit it off and then go separate ways. A second, newer use covers people who live or work together yet somehow rarely see one another. Neutral to wistful in tone; usually frames a brief encounter from a nostalgic or rueful distance. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The image is Longfellow's, but the often-repeated date of 1863 needs correcting: 1863 is when the first series of his Tales of a Wayside Inn appeared, while the relevant lines - 'Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing, / Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness' - come from The Theologian's Tale: Elizabeth, which belongs to the third series, published in 1872-73 (in Aftermath, 1873, per Word Histories; Wikipedia likewise dates the third series to 1872-1873). Longfellow was not first with the image: Henry Ward Beecher used a near-identical comparison in 1858. The phrase spread in the 1890s, popularised by Beatrice Harraden's bestselling 1893 novel Ships that Pass in the Night, whose preface records how she had quoted the lines from memory and then had to hunt for their source. Oscar Wilde echoed the image in The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898).
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- like two ships that pass in the night
- ships in the night
- ships passing in the night
- two ships that passed in the night
Usage Examples
- We swapped life stories for the whole train journey, then went our separate ways - classic ships that pass in the night.
- The two sales reps cover the same region on alternate weeks, so they're basically ships that pass in the night.
- She still wonders about the stranger who helped her change the tyre in the rain; they were ships that passed in the night, and she never learned his name.