Meaning
To be doing something risky that could collapse into trouble at any moment; to act in a way that courts danger, confrontation, or failure. It is often used as a warning that someone is close to overstepping a limit with an employer, the law, or another person's patience. Informal and very common; frequently delivered as a warning ('you're on thin ice') in workplace and family disputes. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The image is the literal hazard of gliding onto ice too thin to bear a skater's weight. The earliest figurative use traced by the Word Histories project is in Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay Prudence in his Essays of 1841: 'In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed'. Emerson's point was nearly the inverse of the modern one, arguing that rapid turnover kept risk at bay, and an 1850 American church document echoes that hastier sense. The current meaning, that thin-ice behavior is courting disaster, is clearly in place by the early 1860s, appearing in the Saturday Review (1861 and 1863) and in Septimus Berdmore's 1863 novel titled Skating on Thin Ice. Cambridge dictionaries define the present-day idiom simply as doing something dangerous or involving risks.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- be on thin ice
- skate on thin ice
- skating over thin ice
- walk on thin ice
Usage Examples
- You are skating on thin ice with these jokes; the director has no sense of humor about the budget.
- By asking for a fourth extension, the contractor is skating on thin ice with its biggest client.
- Officials who ignore the new reporting rules are skating on thin ice with the regulator.