Spit and image
Suggest a CorrectionMeaning
A person who looks strikingly like another person, especially a close relative. Informal and normally used of physical resemblance. Spit and image can sound dialectal or old-fashioned, while spitting image is the standard modern form. Regional use: Wider English; spit and image is now less common than spitting image.
Origin
Spit and image belongs to a family of forms that culminated in the now more familiar spitting image. The underlying image is old: writers in 1602 and 1668 compared a child or likeness to something spit out of another person's mouth. By the early 19th century the very spit of meant an exact likeness; spit and related image forms developed later, and an exact spit and image example is documented in 1891. Spirit and image and splitting image are later attempts to make sense of an expression whose original metaphor had become obscure, not its sources.
Research Sources
Variants
- Spitting image
- Spitten image
Usage Examples
- At that age, Lena was the spit and image of her grandmother.
- The two actors are unrelated, yet one is the spitting image of the other.
- With the same grin and dark curls, the child was his father's spit and image.