Meaning
Daydreaming or letting the mind wander aimlessly instead of attending to the matter in hand. Somewhat literary or ironic now, often used self-deprecatingly to apologise for a lapse of attention, and frequently written as one word or without the hyphen. Gently critical or self-deprecating; more at home in writing and educated speech than in casual talk. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The OED's earliest citation is from 1553, already in the figurative sense of wandering fancies. The traditional account, popularised by Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, derives the image from the poor, often children and elderly women, who trailed hedgerows gathering scraps of wool snagged by passing sheep, treated as the very type of aimless, fruitless wandering; conjectures of this kind appear from The Gentleman's Magazine of 1789 to Notes and Queries in 1889-90, all of them centuries after the phrase itself. Anatoly Liberman, surveying the evidence for the OUP blog, rejects the familiar etymology: documented wool-gathering was purposeful and worthwhile, supplying stuffing for harness and mattresses and in one recorded case a rent payable in wool gathered from thorns, so the metaphor's logic cannot simply be assumed. He concludes the true origin is unknown and that dictionary accounts of it deserve scepticism.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- go woolgathering
Usage Examples
- Stop wool-gathering and write down the gate code before we lose the signal.
- A spot of wool-gathering on the train home is, she claims, how she solves most problems.
- Sorry, I was wool-gathering there; could you repeat the figure for March?