Meaning
Used for emphasis after words like everything, nothing, anything or any to mean 'in existence' or 'imaginable'. Standing alone it means 'in the world at all', a literary use that now mostly echoes the Bible, as in the proverb about there being nothing new in the world. Common and neutral in its emphatic use, though the standalone use sounds literary or biblical. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The English phrase is old and was not invented by Bible translators, though the Bible made it proverbial. Etymonline dates under the sun, meaning 'anywhere in the world', to around 1200, from a late Old English form under sunnan. Wiktionary treats it as a calque of the Hebrew tachat hashemesh, the recurring phrase of Ecclesiastes, and the biblical books carried it into common English: it appears about 29 times in Wycliffe's 14th-century Bible and throughout the King James Version of 1611, whose Ecclesiastes 1:9 gave English the proverb 'no new thing under the sun'. Secular emphatic uses, such as Wilkie Collins's 'every subject under the sun' (The Queen of Hearts, 1859), show it fully naturalised by the Victorian period.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- all under the sun
- anywhere under the sun
- everything under the sun
Usage Examples
- The auction catalogue covered everything under the sun, from vintage watches to kitchen sinks.
- There is nothing new under the sun; every supposedly revolutionary app has a 1990s predecessor.
- She has an opinion on any topic under the sun and shares it freely at dinner parties.