Meaning
Unoccupied people, especially the young, are likely to drift into mischief or trouble, so staying busy keeps a person out of temptation. Typically used to justify work, hobbies, or structured activity, often with a moralizing or half-humorous tone. Homely and slightly moralizing; often aimed at the young or quoted with tongue in cheek. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The idea is ancient Christian moral teaching rather than one author's invention. Jerome's fourth-century letters urge the reader to keep working so that the devil always finds them busy, and Chaucer's Melibee, written around 1405, gives a Middle English version advising good deeds so the devil does not find you unoccupied. The direct ancestor of the modern wording is Isaac Watts's hymn 'Against Idleness and Mischief' in Divine Songs Attempted in Easy Language for the Use of Children (1715), with the line 'Satan finds some mischief still, for idle hands to do.' That hymn was memorized by generations of children and quoted by Dickens in David Copperfield (1850), making Watts's line the proverb's best-known vehicle. The Phrase Finder records the now-familiar wording 'the devil finds work for idle hands to do' in print from February 1848, in The Indicator. The popular claim that the modern saying is simply a rewording of Watts is plausible lineage, but no source documents the actual step from his hymn to the 1848 phrasing, so it should be presented as ancestry rather than documented borrowing.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- Idle hands are the devil's workshop
- Idle hands do the devil's work
- Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do
- The devil finds work for idle hands to do
- The devil makes work for idle hands
Usage Examples
- With two weeks of vacation and nothing planned, Dad started repainting every room in the house, insisting that the devil finds work for idle hands.
- The youth centre stays open all summer precisely because its founders believed the devil finds work for idle hands.
- She took on extra shifts partly for the money and partly, as she put it, to keep the idle-hands proverb from proving itself.