Meaning
Cowardly, lacking nerve. An insulting adjective of American origin, now somewhat jokey or Western-flavoured in use and often intensified in phrases such as yellow-bellied coward. Also heard as the noun yellow-belly for a coward. Informal and derogatory, though usually delivered with a Western-movie or playground flavour rather than real venom. Regional use: American English in origin; now General English.
Origin
The chain is American and only partly explicable. Etymonline records the sense 'cowardly' for yellow itself by 1856, of unknown origin, noting that the colour had previously been associated in English with jealousy and envy in the seventeenth century. The compound yellow-bellied is much older in literal uses: the OED's earliest evidence for the adjective, which has three senses, dates from 1674 in the travel writer John Josselyn, describing things with yellow undersides, as of birds. But Etymonline dates the cowardly compound to 1924, calling it probably a semi-rhyming reduplication of yellow. Earlier yellow-belly nouns were not about courage at all: a Texan name for Mexican soldiers (1842, from uniform colour) and a sailors' term of 1867 for a person of mixed heritage, beside the older Lincolnshire nickname. The cowardice chain therefore runs: yellow meaning cowardly in mid-nineteenth-century America, origin unrecorded; yellow-bellied built on it by the early twentieth century. Folk explanations involving egg yolks and chickens, or a bilious complexion, are speculation.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- yeller-bellied
- yellow
- yellow bellied coward
- yellow-belly
Usage Examples
- Calling the expedition's sponsor yellow-bellied was unfair; he had simply priced the risks differently.
- The recruits teased anyone who balked at the rope bridge as yellow-bellied, then quietly helped them across.
- It was a yellow-bellied decision to cancel the debate rather than defend the policy.