What Does Sleep Like a Log Mean?

4 Min Read | By Liam Porter

Last Modified 13 June 2024   First Added 8 October 2021

This article was written and reviewed in line with our editorial policy.

Meaning:

Sleep like a log is a simile that means to sleep soundly without moving.

Examples of use

  • It was such a long day, but I slept like a log!
  • She works really hard, but she sleeps like a log.

Origins:

Similes are as old as the hills – they’re like a foundation upon which much of literature is built. As such, the more obvious of similes go back some way. Often, they crossed national boundaries with the populations of migrants and soldiers that ebbed and flowed over Europe for much of history. It was therefore surprising that most online etymological discussions around the phrase “sleep like a log”, and Ngram data goes back only to around the early 19th century.

With a little more research, however, you can follow it back to a couple of documented examples in the mid-16th century in Spanish, and mid-17th century in English. For example, the Spanish occurrence is in a poem called Cancionero llamado Sarao de amor (songbook called [untranslatable] of love) by Juan de Timoneda (1561) which reads:

 

De que’s en la cama

duerme como un leño,

bien harto de migas

 

Which roughly translates to:

What’s in bed

sleeps like a log,

well fed up with crumbs

While not proof that the phrase would have made it into the English language at the exact time, documented idioms tend to have been present colloquially for some time. And considering Philip II of Spain was briefly the King of England from 1554 to 1558 – there was plenty of cross-cultural interaction in the form of various wars, so it’s likely that language travelled across the same borders. However, despite this early connection between Spain and England, more recent history shows the phrase entering American publications more so than their British counterparts.

 

Then he went home and slept like a log.

The first example was found in a collection of newspaper anecdotes cited in the Boston Transcript of 1830, while the second comes from The Life and Adventures of Dr Dodimus Duckworth, published in New York in 1833. More examples can also be found of this phrase in American texts of a similar time. It’s therefore fair to assume that this prevalence of usage in American publications suggests the phrase was most well established across the Atlantic.

That said, it was clearly also in usage in British texts too around a similar time too – just less frequently. One of the earliest examples we can find in a British text is in an article for the Gloucestershire Chronicle on the 12th of April 1834, as presented by The British Newspaper Archive:

… had slept like a log of wood all night, and that he had not had a wink of sleep

Despite the fact usage of this phrase really started to gain momentum around the early 19th century in English speaking countries, it is still reasonable to assume it entered into common use in English around the end of the 16th and maybe as late as the early 17th Century. The prevalence of similar phrases appearing in other European languages at this time creates a strong argument that the origin goes back at least this far and perhaps somewhat further.

Notable appearances in popular culture:

As with most long-lived idioms, ‘sleep like a log’ and close equivalents feature in plenty of song lyrics and the text and titles of other works. From inclusion in Louis Armstrong’s The Home Fire, to use as the title of television hypnotist and hypnotherapist Paul McKenna’s sleep aid cassette tapes (which The Independent once described as: ‘more appropriate to training a kitten to use a litter tray’), the phrase has been used everywhere as a folksy synonym for sleep.

For other well-known sleep idioms check out what ‘hit the hay‘, ‘catch some z’s‘, ‘sleep tight‘ or what waking up on ‘the wrong side of the bed’ means.

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