Meaning
To reverse the direction of a contest, crisis or trend, so that fortunes shift from one side to the other. It usually describes a decisive intervention - a goal, a speech, a battle - after which the side that was losing begins to win. Neutral register with a heroic undertone; it implies a dramatic and usually positive reversal. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The metaphor transfers the turn of the sea's tide to human affairs. 'Tide' originally meant simply time or season - Old English tid, surviving in Yuletide and eventide - with the rise-and-fall-of-the-sea sense emerging by the mid-14th century and figurative uses of tide following in the late 14th. Shakespeare has Worcester say in 1 Henry IV, written in the mid-to-late 1590s, that an ally's presence 'may turn the tide of fearful faction'. A modern annotated edition of Dryden's plays notes that the earliest use recorded in the OED comes from his comedy The Wild Gallant (1663): 'Till this strange man had power to turn the tide'. Idiom references note that the fully fixed expression, particularly the noun form 'turn of the tide', crystallised in the first half of the 19th century, by which time battle reporting had made turning the tide a stock image.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- the turn of the tide
- turn the tide of
- turned the tide
- turning of the tide
Usage Examples
- Two goals in stoppage time turned the tide of a final that had seemed lost.
- The arrival of fresh supplies turned the tide for the besieged garrison.
- Voters under thirty may turn the tide in next month's referendum.