Meaning
Someone - or something - badly suited to their position, a misfit forced into a role that their shape will never match. The image carries the mechanism with it: no amount of pushing makes a square peg fit a round hole, and the effort usually damages both peg and hole. Gently sympathetic rather than hostile - it pities the misfit more than it blames the hole; equally common of arrangements and institutions as of people. Regional use: General English.
Origin
Christine Ammer dates the expression to about 1800 and notes that its origin is often attributed to the Victorian clergyman Sydney Smith, famed for his wit, though the attribution is folk etymology rather than record. What the record does show is how quickly the image became a Victorian fixture: in England under Seven Administrations (1836) the journalist Albany Fonblanque wrote that 'Sir Robert Peel was a smooth round peg in a sharp-cornered square hole, and Lord Lyndhurst is a rectangular square-cut peg in a smooth round hole', showing both orders of the image already in play. Edward Bulwer-Lytton used the now-standard form in his 1873 novel Kenelm Chillingly, satirizing parents who insist upon forcing a square peg into a round hole when choosing a son's path in life, and W. Somerset Maugham made it the emblem of his hero in The Moon and Sixpence (1919): in England and France he was the square peg in the round hole. A British Second World War recruitment poster later wore the phrase, and Wiktionary records its modern reach across a dozen languages.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a square peg in a round hole
- force a square peg into a round hole
- square pegs in round holes
Usage Examples
- A brilliant researcher but a hopeless chairman, he was a square peg in a round hole from the first meeting.
- The scheme crammed rural post offices into city rules - a square peg in a round hole, as every review concluded.
- She left the bank after two unhappy years, admitting she had been a square peg in a round hole all along.