Meaning
Serious trouble or unpleasant consequences looming, usually as the price of something already done or left undone. It typically appears with there'll be or there was: if the boss finds out, there will be the devil to pay. The tone is grim but often half comic. Informal and slightly old-fashioned; almost always introduced by there'll be or there was. Resist repeating the deck-seam story as fact. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The popular nautical story says the devil was a ship's most awkward seam and pay meant caulking it with pitch, giving the stretched form 'the devil to pay and no pitch hot', first recorded in 1744 in Alexander Hamilton's travel diary and glossed by Grose's slang dictionary in 1788. Etymologists reject this as the source of the general idiom: the nautical version surfaces more than two centuries after the phrase itself, differs in sense, and the old references cannot even agree which seam was the devil. The genuine origin is a Faustian reckoning - paying the devil the price of a bargain. An isolated manuscript line of about 1475 already plays on serving the devil to pay, and Jonathan Swift was writing 'there will be the devil and all to pay' in letters of 1711. Here pay descends through Old French from Latin pacare, to appease or satisfy, so the devil is a creditor, not a seam; Michael Quinion judges the sailors' phrase a later pun or a separate expression.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- hell to pay
- the devil and all to pay
- the devil to pay and no pitch hot
Usage Examples
- If the auditors find those missing receipts, there will be the devil to pay in the finance office.
- She knew there would be the devil to pay when she got home three hours past curfew without calling.
- We moved the client meeting to Friday without telling anyone, and there was the devil to pay afterward.