Meaning
Success comes from consistent, unhurried effort rather than from bursts of speed or unreliable brilliance; a plodding but persistent approach is the surer route to finishing first. It serves both as encouragement to the methodical and as a rebuke to the overconfident. Encouraging, slightly admonishing register; a staple of classrooms and motivational writing, sometimes cliched. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The saying condenses Aesop's fable of the tortoise and the hare (Perry Index 226), but the English wording is surprisingly late. In the classical Greek tellings the emphasis fell on the hare's foolish overconfidence rather than on the tortoise's virtues, and no English version of the fable is known before Francis Barlow's edition of 1667. The familiar phrasing is usually traced to the poet Robert Lloyd's verse retelling 'The Hare and the Tortoise' (1762), whose victorious tortoise concludes with the moral that slow and steady wins the race; quotation and proverb dictionaries attribute the line to Lloyd. The proverb then became the standard printed moral of the fable in nineteenth-century collections and schoolbooks, which fixed its current form.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- slow and steady
- slow and sure wins the race
- slow but steady wins the race
- slowly but surely
Usage Examples
- Slow and steady wins the race, the coach kept repeating, so we shipped one small improvement every week.
- He never crammed for anything, trusting that slow and steady wins the race, and finished the degree near the top of his class.
- Their rivals sprinted into the market and then stalled; in the end slow and steady won the race.