Where Did the Phrase "Back to the Grind" Come From?

If you get "back to the grind," then you return to work or to your regular everyday routine—especially with the added notion that you’re doing so after some kind of prolonged break or vacation, or that the work or routine that you’re returning to is somehow unwanted, unpleasant, or monotonously exhausting. But in this context at least, what exactly is "the grind"? And why are we getting back to it? "Grind" Started as College SlangHarvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1870. | Bildagentur-online/GettyImagesFor such a modern-sounding expression, oddly, the origins of back to the grind date back to the mid-1800s. It was then that grind, as a noun, first came to be used to mean hard work or labor—a meaning that appears to have first emerged in American college slang. The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest record of this sense of the word dates from 1851, when grind, defined as "an oppressive action," was listed in A Collection of College Words and Customs by American author and historian Benjamin Homer Hall. "Students speak of a very long lesson which they are required to learn," Hall explained, "or of anything which is very unpleasant or difficult to perform as a grind." For Hall to have encountered sufficient evidence of the word being used to include it in his glossary, we can presume that it was already fairly well established in college-speak before the date his book was published; tellingly, the slang lexicographer Jonathon Green has since unearthed a slightly earlier record from a poem written at Harvard in 1850. But why call such a tiring and oppressive period of work a grind? Well, Hall has that covered too. "This meaning is derived from the verb to grind," he likewise explains, "in the sense of to harass, [or] to afflict." This figurative application of the same verb we use when talking of grinding corn, meanwhile, has been part of our language since medieval times. How the "Grind" Escaped the ClassroomTom Kelley Archive/GettyImagesFrom the mid-1800s in America, it didn’t take long for this kind of "grind" to catch on in the UK too, with the English author Thomas Hughes including it in his 1859 novel Tom Brown at Oxford (the sequel to his far better known Tom Brown’s School Days, published in 1857). Although the written evidence suggests the expression remained all but confined to college and university vernacular until the later 19th century (when a "grind" could also mean an especially hard-working student), by the end of the Victorian era it appears to have drifted into more widespread use in turn-of-the-century slang on both sides of the Atlantic. The phrase remained in use throughout the 20th century, until the first known reference to specifically getting "back to the grind"—that is, returning to work—.in the 1980s. More Like This: