Meaning
To spoil a plan, arrangement, or otherwise stable situation, usually suddenly; to ruin things that were going smoothly. Commonly used with a possessive, as in 'don't upset our applecart', and typically about shared plans rather than private ones. Informal and slightly old-fashioned in flavour; mildly negative, treating stability as the thing damaged. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The early slang sense was not about plans at all: an 'apple-cart' was jocular slang for the human body, and 'down with his apple-cart' meant to knock a man down - Francis Grose recorded it in 1788, with the idea on record from about 1750. The modern sense appears in 1788 in Jeremy Belknap's 'History of New Hampshire' ('Adams had almost overset the apple-cart'), though The Phrase Finder and World Wide Words agree it stayed rare until it became widespread in the late 1830s on both sides of the Atlantic, passing through an intermediate sense of suffering a personal tumble. Michael Quinion notes a classical parallel in Plautus - 'perii, plaustrum perculi', 'I'm done for, I've upset my wagon' (c. 200 BCE) - but doubts any direct borrowing, crediting native English wit instead; usage peaked in the 1930s, possibly boosted by Shaw's 1929 political comedy 'The Apple Cart'.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- overset the apple-cart
- upset someone's applecart
Usage Examples
- A last-minute change to the venue upset the applecart for the whole conference schedule.
- Nobody wanted to upset the applecart by questioning the founder's pricing plan.
- The whistleblower's letter overset the applecart that the board had so carefully arranged.