Where does the expression "to pop one's clogs" come from, with regard to dying?

Question

You hear that someone popped their clogs, meaning they died. Is this expression only used in London, or the UK? Where does it originate from? (and what do clogs sound like when they pop?)

Answer 1

Pop as referred to in the song 'Pop goes the weasel' refers to pawning property. Therefore it seems that the deceased belongings were popped or pawned possibly to cover the cost of burial, have a wake etc. hence they 'popped their clogs'.

Answer 2

It is mainly a British English slang expression, dating, so far as I can gather from the few slang and idiom dictionaries that cite it, only from the 1970s. The impression is that it seems to have either originated in—or been popularised by—television presenters and disc jockeys.

Clogs were the traditional workers’ footwear in several trades in the industrial towns and cities of midlands and northern Britain, for women as well as men, now rarely seen but at one time almost an icon of working class life. The sound of workers’ clogs on cobbled streets at the end of a shift has been likened to thunder.

The verb to pop may be the old term for pawning goods. The implication is that someone would only want to pawn his clogs when he had no further need for them, that is, when he was about to die. But it’s also possible that it’s linked to the idiom to pop off (an abbreviation of pop off the hooks), which can also mean to die.

On the basis of citation evidence, it looks like a pseudo-archaic form, unrecorded from times when workers did usually wear clogs to work and did often pawn small items each week to tide them over cash shortages. But I have had one subscriber tell me that he clearly remembers it being used in Lincolnshire 50 years ago, so it may be yet another example of a folk expression that existed for generations without being recorded in print.

Answer 3

"He or She will clog again". A former saying in Lancashire and Yorkshire mill towns meaning that a person will recover from an illness or accident. It derives from the meaning of repairable clogs.

'From the above I would suggest that 'Popping the clogs' would imply that they had died.'

Answer 4

From when people wore clogs and when they collapsed their clogs popped together?

Answer 5

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