Meaning
Intensive, prolonged questioning of someone, originally by police and often implying rough or coercive treatment; now usually jocular for any barrage of searching personal questions, as from relatives, border officials or colleagues. Standard in the pattern 'give someone the third degree'. Originally grim, evoking police brutality; in everyday modern use it is jocular or exaggerated. Regional use: General English.
Origin
Grading qualities by degree is medieval: Lyte's 1578 translation of Dodoens's herbal calls rue 'hoate and drye in the thirde degree', and Shakespeare's Twelfth Night (1602) has a drinker 'in the third degree of drinke'. The Phrase Finder links the modern sense to Freemasonry, in which the third or Master Mason rank is the highest of the three lodge degrees and its ceremony includes an interrogation of the candidate; that interrogation, the argument runs, named an American police technique of gruelling questioning. The earliest citation for this sense that the site found is from Everybody's Magazine in 1900 ('From time to time a prisoner... claims to have had the Third Degree administered to him'). A rival explanation counts interrogation under torture as the third of three escalating degrees. The Masonic account is the one usually given, but it rests on inference rather than a documented trail, and lexicographers present it as likely rather than proven.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- give them the full third degree
- third-degree interrogation
Usage Examples
- Customs gave her the third degree for an hour over a jar of honey in her suitcase.
- My aunts subjected every new partner to the third degree at Sunday lunch.
- The committee's third degree about the missing invoices left the intern close to tears.