Meaning
A sharp, informal rebuke telling someone to face reality and pay attention to what is actually happening, especially when they are in denial, deluded or badly mistaken. Usually imperative ('wake up and smell the coffee - he is using you') and strongly associated with blunt American advice-column rhetoric. Merriam-Webster defines it as realizing the truth about one's situation. Informal and often rude; typically imperative and second person, so it reads as a put-down in formal writing. Merriam-Webster's entry also carries the wake up and smell the roses variant. The Phrase Finder has no meanings page for it; its bulletin-board threads from 2000-2002 left the origin unresolved. Regional use: United States origin; now international English.
Origin
American, built on the breakfast image of coffee's aroma jolting a sleeper into awareness. Documented print use begins decades before its famous popularizer: Word Histories records 'smelling the coffee' in a letter to the Akron Beacon Journal of 4 June 1927, and the full phrase in umpire-heckling shouts quoted in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle of 18 July 1934. The OED's earliest evidence, per the same article, is the Chicago Daily Tribune of 18 January 1943, where a reader's joke plays on the figurative and literal meanings. Ann Landers did not coin it: asked in 1987, she said she picked it up from the mother-in-law of her twin sister 'Dear Abby'; her columns from 1970 made it a national catchphrase. Two popular origin stories fail: the claimed first use in the book Wine, Women and Words is doubly shaky (the book dates from 1948, and the 1927-1943 newspaper record predates it anyway), and no documented coffee-advertising campaign underlies it.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- wake up and smell the decaf
- wake up and smell the roses
Usage Examples
- You keep saying the landlord will fix the roof eventually - wake up and smell the coffee, he never will.
- After three straight quarters of losses, management finally woke up and smelled the coffee and cut the failing product line.
- If she thinks a two-line apology will undo the damage, she needs to wake up and smell the coffee.