Meaning
A deceptively quiet or peaceful period just before trouble, conflict or intense activity erupts. Usually spoken with foreboding rather than relief, and also used wryly of stillness before a rush of work such as a holiday season or a product launch. Neutral register with an undertone of menace or anticipation; a stock phrase in news commentary and everyday speech. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The first known record is theatrical: the play The Dumb Knight, printed in London in 1608 (Lewis Machin writing with Gervase Markham), contains the line 'but hush! no words; there is a calm before the tempest'. According to the Phrase Finder it only became a familiar saying in the last decades of the 1700s, and the modern wording with storm in place of tempest was in print by the 1820s, Mary Shelley using it figuratively in The Last Man (1826) of a king who failed to use 'this last calm before the storm'. The common claim of a sailors' origin, based on the genuine meteorological lull that can precede a storm and on seafaring weather-wisdom, is plausible inference rather than documentation: the earliest record is a stage line, and no primary source ties the phrase's coinage to the sea. The weather phenomenon itself is real but not universal, which the figurative use conveniently ignores.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a calm before the storm
- the calm before the tempest
- the lull before the storm
- the quiet before the storm
Usage Examples
- The hallway fell silent as the jury filed back in; that silence was the calm before the storm of the verdict.
- Retailers describe late November as the calm before the storm of holiday orders.
- Her uncharacteristically gentle tone that afternoon was the calm before the storm; by evening she had resigned.