What Does ‘Hit the Hay’ Mean?

Like many expressions that enter into common use from colloquial language, the exact origin of the phrase is virtually impossible to pin down – for example, the phrase ‘hit the hay-stack with the best of us’ appears in The Waverly Novels by Sir Walter Scott, but its meaning is difficult to infer from context.

However, we can pinpoint the approximate time by checking the first occurrences in print. In the case of ‘hit the hay,’ this begins to happen at the turn of the 20^th Century when it appears in a novel by Indiana born writer George Ade, who was writing at the time in Chicago, called People You Know:

The Chicago connection continues for the phrase as, in the same year (1903), The Okland Tribune ran a story on Sam (Smiling Sammy) Berger, a heavyweight boxer, which features the following:

There is also another often-reported sporting reference, from Paxton Sport USA in 1905, in which the author states:

Based on the proliferation of use at the turn of the 20^th century, and the multiple references from sports, it’s probably safe to say that the origin of the phrase is likely to have arisen sometime in the late 19^th century.

This would also place it within the first rural-urban migration in the US (1870 – 1920) and would therefore also make sense in relation to another commonly held assumption that hitting the ‘hay’ is a reference to the plumping of straw mattresses.

The majority of early US spring mattress firms, such as Serta, Simmons and Sealy Corporation, were incorporated in the late 19^th century (1880s onward), but it was still reasonably common for rural families to make their own mattresses – whether by bailing cotton or by stuffing sacks with straw.

Documentation of idioms in print tends to be a lagging factor in determining the origin of colloquial phrases. Barring authors that excel in neologism, writers tend to coin phrases rather than invent them, especially journalists – for whom comprehension is key.

However, an Ngram search for the words does reveal an earlier use:

The time at which the phrase is first documented is at a midpoint during one of the largest internal migrations of the US population to that point, so it’s no wonder that the period sees a proliferation of phrases from rural communities entering common use in populations more likely to document such terms.