What does 'Dead as a doornail' refer to/mean?

Answer 1

Dead As A Doornail

Nails were once hand tooled and costly. When an aging cabin or barn was torn down the valuable nails would be salvaged so they could be reused in later construction.

When building a door however, carpenters often drove the nail through then bent it over the other end so it couldn't work its way out during the repeated opening and closing of the door. When it came time to salvage the building, these door nails were considered useless, or "dead" because of the bend.

Also: From Shakespeare's King Henry VI. "... come thou and thy five men, and if I do not leave you all as dead as a doornail, I pray God I may never eat grass more.

Answer 2

This is an ancient expression: we have a reference to this dating back to 1350, and it also appears in the fourteenth-century work The Vision of Piers Plowman and in Shakespeare’s Henry IV. Another expression, of rather later date, is as dead as a herring, because most people only saw herrings when they were long dead and preserved; there are other similes with the same meaning, such as dead as mutton, or dead as a stone.

But why particularly a doornail, rather than just any old nail? Could it be because of the repetition of sounds, and the much better rhythm of the phrase compared with the version without door? Almost certainly the euphony has caused the phrase to survive longer than the alternatives I’ve quoted. But could there something special about a doornail?

The usual reason given is that a doornail was one of the heavy studded nails on the outside of a medieval door, or possibly that the phrase refers to the particularly big one on which the knocker rested. A doornail, because of its size and probable antiquity, would seem dead enough for any proverb; the one on which the knocker sat might be thought particularly dead because of the number of times it had been knocked on the head.

But William and Mary Morris, in The Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, quote a correspondent who points out that it could come from a standard term in carpentry. If you hammer a nail through a piece of timber and then flatten the end over on the inside so it can’t be removed again (a technique called clinching), the nail is said to be dead, because you can’t use it again. Doornails would very probably have been subjected to this treatment to give extra strength in the years before screws were available. So they were dead because they’d been clinched. It sounds plausible, but whether it’s right or not we will probably never know.

Answer 3

it means completely lifeless

DEAD AS A DOORNAIL
[Q] From Clyde W Hathaway: “How about dead as a doornail?”

[A] This is an ancient expression: we have a reference to this dating back to 1350, and it also appears in the fourteenth-century work The Vision of Piers Plowman and in Shakespeare’s Henry IV. Another expression, of rather later date, is as dead as a herring, because most people only saw herrings when they were long dead and preserved; there are other similes with the same meaning, such as dead as mutton, or dead as a stone.

But why particularly a doornail, rather than just any old nail? Could it be because of the repetition of sounds, and the much better rhythm of the phrase compared with the version without door? Almost certainly the euphony has caused the phrase to survive longer than the alternatives I’ve quoted. But could there something special about a doornail?

The usual reason given is that a doornail was one of the heavy studded nails on the outside of a medieval door, or possibly that the phrase refers to the particularly big one on which the knocker rested. A doornail, because of its size and probable antiquity, would seem dead enough for any proverb; the one on which the knocker sat might be thought particularly dead because of the number of times it had been knocked on the head.

But William and Mary Morris, in The Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, quote a correspondent who points out that it could come from a standard term in carpentry. If you hammer a nail through a piece of timber and then flatten the end over on the inside so it can’t be removed again (a technique called clinching), the nail is said to be dead, because you can’t use it again. Doornails would very probably have been subjected to this treatment to give extra strength in the years before screws were available. So they were dead because they’d been clinched. It sounds plausible, but whether it’s right or not we will probably never know.

Answer 4

Dead As A Doornail

Nails were once hand tooled and costly. When an aging cabin or barn was torn down the valuable nails would be salvaged so they could be reused in later construction.

When building a door however, carpenters often drove the nail through then bent it over the other end so it couldn't work its way out during the repeated opening and closing of the door. When it came time to salvage the building, these door nails were considered useless, or "dead" because of the bend.

Also: From Shakespeare's King Henry VI. "... come thou and thy five men, and if I do not leave you all as dead as a doornail, I pray God I may never eat grass more.

Answer 5

Apart from sounding good, I believe this to refer to bending a doornail (on the sharp end) to prevent it being reused or pulled out.

A doornail is a decorative nail in a door which is also supposed to strengthen the door.

Answer 6

This is from at least 14th century. There's a reference to it in print in 1350:

"For but ich haue bote of mi bale I am ded as dorenail."

Shakespeare used it in King Henry VI, 1590:

CADE:

Brave thee! ay, by the best blood that ever was
broached, and beard thee too. Look on me well: I
have eat no meat these five days; yet, come thou and
thy five men, and if I do not leave you all as dead
as a doornail, I pray God I may never eat grass more.

Why door-nails are cited as a particular example of deadness isn't clear. Door-nails are the large-headed studs that were used in earlier times for strength and more recently as decoration. The practise was to hammer the nail through and then bend over the protruding end to secure it. This process, similar to riveting, was called clenching. This may be the source of the 'deadness', as such a nail would be unusable afterwards.

Answer 7

It just means someone/something is really dead. No idea who came up with doornail...but anyway, I won't understand why piece of cake represents something easy as pie, but someone said it and it got so popular...so we use these expressions without knowing how they came to be.

Answer 8

It means dead, motionless. One can say "I am as dead as a doornail" to mean you are very tired etc. You can also say something is as dead as a doornail.

Answer 9

it refers to nails where the ends were bent over after being put through a piece of wood. The nail would not be reusable.

Answer 10

Dead. lifeless