Meaning
To abandon careful judgment and act boldly or recklessly despite a known risk of failure. The plural 'to the winds' is the older form and both survive; the expression admits either daring or foolhardiness depending on outcome. Informal register; admiring when the risk pays off, disapproving or ironic when it does not. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The construction rests on the older idiom 'to the winds', meaning utterly gone or scattered beyond recovery, which Dictionary.com's American Heritage-backed origin note traces to the mid-1600s; casting things to the wind so they are lost forever is the underlying picture. The same entry gives 1885 as the first recorded use of throw to the winds in the caution sense, and caution only became the favorite object of the verb in the late 19th century, displacing other things people cast away. The singular wind now rivals the plural winds in everyday use, and current dictionaries list throw, fling and cast as interchangeable verbs. In short: the discarding image is 17th century, the fixed caution formula is late 19th century, dated to 1885 by one dictionary-backed source.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- cast caution to the winds
- fling caution to the wind
- throw caution to the winds
- toss caution to the wind
Usage Examples
- After the audition, she threw caution to the wind and sang the aria unaccompanied.
- The gallery's buyers threw caution to the wind at the auction, and the sale set three records in an hour.
- He threw caution to the winds, quit the firm, and moved to Lisbon with two suitcases.