Meaning
The member of a family or group who is regarded as a disgrace, a failure, or the odd one out, and whose reputation the others quietly distance themselves from. Typically in the phrase the black sheep of the family. The label is judgmental and often unfair, though it is also self-applied with humor. Negative and judgmental in force, though frequently used with rueful humor or self-deprecation. Regional use: General English.
Origin
Documented history: English proverbs already treated a black sheep as a harmful beast in the 1500s - an anonymous ballad from the reign of Henry VIII repeats 'the blacke shepe is a perylous beast', and Thomas Bastard in 1598 cites 'a blacke sheepe was a biting beast' as an existing saying. The first clear application to people is Thomas Shepard's The Sincere Convert (1640), which says Scripture 'brands for blacke sheepe' drunkards, swearers, whores and liars. The explanations offered for the underlying prejudice are practical and symbolic: black fleece cannot be dyed, so a black sheep's wool was worth less commercially than white, and the color black itself has long carried negative connotations. A further theory links the phrase to Coverdale's 1535 Bible rendering of Genesis 30:32 ('all blacke shepe amonge the lambes'), but in that story the dark animals are Jacob's agreed reward rather than a disgrace, and the King James version dropped the wording, so the biblical route is plausible at most. Notably, some nineteenth-century English shepherds regarded a black sheep as lucky (Folk-Lore Record, 1878), so the superstition ran both ways.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- black sheep of the family
- black sheep of the flock
- the family's black sheep
Usage Examples
- An uncle who never appeared at reunions was always spoken of as the black sheep of the family.
- After the audit, the subsidiary became the black sheep of the conglomerate, starved of investment.
- She cheerfully admits to being the black sheep of a household of accountants; she paints murals for a living.