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A section for all you budding etymologists where each week the origin of a word or phrase is investigated.
This week it is..... Draw a blank
To fail to recall a memory or fail in some speculative
effort.
This phrase originates from the lottery that was
established in Tudor England. Elizabeth I, like the
monarchs of other European countries at the time, was
short of money and decided to copy rival nation states
by instituting a national lottery. The money so raised
was intended to go towards the ‘reparation of the havens
and strength of the Realm and towards further public
works’. She signed the license granting the lottery in
1567 (not so much a signature, more a craft project).
Lotteries at that time worked by putting tickets with the
participant’s names on them into a ‘lot pot’. An equal
number of notes, some with the prizes written on them
and some of which were blank, went into another pot.
Pairs of tickets were drawn simultaneously from the
two pots. It is easy to see how a failure to succeed came
to be associated with drawing a blank.
Sir William More (1520-1600), when he found time to
spare from his numerous other posts, which included
‘Her Majesty’s Deputy Master of the Swans’, was
the ‘Treasurer of the Lottery in Surrey’. The Loseley
Manuscripts are a unique archive of the More-Molyneux
family who have for centuries lived in the beautiful Tudor
manor house Loseley Park. The manuscripts contain a
unique record of life in Tudor and Stuart England and
include More’s description of the lottery:
“A verie rich Lotterie ... without any blancks.”
And so it should have been. The tickets cost ten shillings
each - at a time when labourers were paid about a shilling
a day. The prizes included silver plate and tapestry.
Although the first time that someone ‘drew a blank’ was
in the 16th century, the phrase wasn’t recorded in print
until the 19th, in Washington Irving’s Tales of a Traveller,
1824, in which the plot involves a character being given
credit for something he hadn’t done: “It is like being
congratulated on the high prize when one has drawn a
blank.” Soon after that date the phrase began to be used
in hunting circles; for example, from the 1832 Hunting
Songs by the impressively named Rowland Eyes
Egerton-Warburton: “The man - whose heart heaves a
sigh when his gorse is drawn blank.”
Later in the 19th century it became used in a general
figurative sense to mean to be unsuccessful in a venture
or search of any kind.
siamexpat.