Meaning
A friendly, usually affectionate label for a mischievous or roguish person, or an exclamation of surprise, admiration or mock reproach. In American English it long served as a euphemism for a cruder insult. Both uses now sound dated or old-fashioned, though they remain widely understood. Affectionate or jocular rather than hostile; in modern use it can sound vintage or stagy. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The Phrase Finder records the first known printing in The British Apollo in 1708 ('You'r a Son of a Gun'), already a mild jibe rather than a technical term; a 1787 correspondent to The Gentleman's Magazine took it to mean 'a soldier's brat', and an 1823 slang dictionary glossed it the same way. The best-known story is naval: women allegedly tolerated aboard Royal Navy ships were said to give birth between the guns, with the child logged as a 'son of a gun', an account supported at one remove by Admiral William Henry Smyth's Sailor's Word-Book of 1867, which applies the term to boys born afloat when wives accompanied husbands to sea. That explanation surfaces more than a century after the phrase itself, and specialists treat it as unproven; a rival view takes the whole thing as a rhyming softening of 'son of a bitch', itself centuries older. The origin is genuinely disputed.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- son of a gun! (exclamation)
- son-of-a-gun (hyphenated modifier)
- sons of guns (plural)
- you old son of a gun
Usage Examples
- That son of a gun fixed the generator with a paperclip and a bit of string.
- He won the office raffle twice in one evening, the lucky son of a gun.
- Well, I'll be a son of a gun: the package actually arrived a day early.