Meaning
A jocular superlative for a wonderful new invention or innovation, implying it is the most exciting thing to appear since pre-sliced loaf bread first went on sale. Usually applied to something clever or convenient but ultimately modest. Informal and breezy, often faintly ironic; rarely used with complete seriousness about a genuine innovation. Regional use: General English; from American English.
Origin
Sliced bread began commercially in July 1928, when the Chillicothe Baking Company of Chillicothe, Missouri used Otto Rohwedder's bread-slicing machine to sell 'Kleen Maid' sliced bread; the local Constitution-Tribune advertised it on 6 July 1928 as 'the greatest forward step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped', and first sales are usually dated 7 July 1928. Wonder Bread took sliced loaves national from 1930, and by 1933 roughly 80 percent of American bread was pre-sliced. Bakers' advertisements of the 1930s soon measured novelties against it ('the first improvement since sliced bread', 1933; 'the newest thing since sliced bread', 1939). The figurative superlative is first recorded in 1951, when the Belfast Northern Whig quoted the American columnist Dorothy Kilgallen calling someone 'the greatest thing since sliced bread'.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- better than sliced bread
- greatest thing since sliced bread
- the best invention since sliced bread
- the greatest thing since sliced bread
Usage Examples
- The app's fans called it the greatest thing since sliced bread, though it mostly just reordered your photos.
- He marketed his self-stirring mug as the best thing since sliced bread.
- Indoor plumbing, not the new phone, was the real best thing since sliced bread, my aunt likes to say.