The Curious Origins of ‘The Straw that Broke the Camel’s Back’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Let’s begin with a nice easy pub quiz question. Which light object was the thing which eventually broke the camel’s back, in the earliest uses of that famous proverb?

A straw, right? Think again.

In fact, it wasn’t even a camel’s back in the original proverb. So which animal was it, and which lightweight object finally did its back in for once and for all?

Although the phrases ‘the last straw’, ‘the final straw’, and ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’ have now all become part of everyday language, straws figured nowhere in the original iterations of this proverbial expression.

The Meaning

Let’s start with the meaning of the proverb. Saying that something is the straw that broke the camel’s back or the last straw which breaks the camel’s back or any other variation on this idea is essentially a colourful way of saying, ‘if you keep adding burdens or problems to something, eventually one relatively small additional burden will bring about complete disaster’.

So, for example, someone overburdened with stressful jobs to do at work might finally crack under all of the pressure when a colleague comes to them and asks them to perform an extra, fairly straightforward little task. It doesn’t matter that it’s a relatively small thing to ask: on top of all of the other problems that person faces, this final request was ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’.

Origins

Curiously, when this idiom first surfaces in writing in the seventeenth century, there’s no mention of a straw – nor is there mention of a camel. In his Defence of True Liberty of Human Actions (1655) by the theologian John Bramhall, who became Archbishop of Armagh, we find a reference to an animal, but it is not a camel. What’s more, there’s not a straw in sight:

It is the last feather may be said to break an Horses back.

So when the phrase first appeared in print, it was the last feather, not straw, which initially broke a horse’s, not camel’s, back.

Later Uses

By the late eighteenth century, as the citations in The Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs attest, the horse had been ousted in favour of the now more familiar beast of burden, the camel. In the Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts (1793), one writer refers to it being ‘certainly true that the last feather will sink the camel’.

So, clearly the feather hadn’t made way for the straw yet, although that had all changed half a century later, when in 1846, Charles Dickens used the idiom in its more familiar form in his neglected novel Dombey and Son:

As the last straw breaks the laden camel’s back, this piece of underground information crushed the sinking spirits of Mr. Dombey.

(This novel, by the way, is unfairly overlooked in Dickens’s oeuvre. The BBC produced an adaptation back in 1983, but no film or TV company has given it the big- or small-screen treatment since, presumably because it doesn’t feature Tiny Tim, Magwitch, or Mr Micawber. It does, however, have one of Dickens’s finest comic creations, Major Joe Bagstock.)

Variations 

As for ‘the last straw’, that slightly cryptic clipping or truncating of the original idiom first appears in the 1840s, where ‘straw’ is left without its camel, and we must infer the significance of a ‘final’ or ‘last’ straw from our wider knowledge of related proverbs.

But in a sense, even in its more usual iteration, the proverb is a slight reduction of the full phrase, since the word ‘last’ is normally omitted, so it’s simply ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’. Of course, the idiom asks to be taken metaphorically: the idea of something as light as a straw doing the camel in seems absurd.

But the force of the proverb comes from the very gulf between the lightness of a straw (or, originally, a feather) and the heavy sturdiness of the camel (or, originally, the horse).

Why did straws come to replace feathers? Perhaps because it makes more sense for straw (as part of a bundle) to be loaded onto the back of a beast of burden, than it does for feathers to be placed there as cargo. But like many of these little quirks of language-use, it’s hard to say for sure.