Dead Ringer

Meaning of Idiom ‘Dead Ringer’

A dead ringer is a person or thing that resembles another person or thing perfectly or almost perfectly; someone who looks very similar to another person; an exact or near exact likeness or duplicate. ¹,²,³

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Usage

Dead ringer is usually used in the full phrase “to be a dead ringer for someone.”

Examples Of Use

“That lawyer is a dead ringer for Robert Redford, right down to his hair color.”

“Has anyone ever told you that you’re a dead ringer for your aunt Julie when she was your age?”

“The police thought they had found my car but the identification numbers didn’t match. The car they found was a dead ringer for mine, though. It even had a dent in the same spot!”

Origin

Used since the late 1800s. ⁴

Ringer has long been used to refer to something which “rings false” and was originally applied to a horse that was dishonestly substituted for another horse in a race. Today, the term is still used to refer to fakes or imposters, such as players substituted on teams who are not on the official roster or who shouldn’t be eligible to play but give an advantage to the team.

Dead is used as an intensifier in many expressions and here it is used to mean precise or exact. ⁵,⁶

False Zombie Origin!

A quite popular false origin has been attached to this idiom. According to this story, people in medieval Britain were terrified of being mistaken for dead and buried alive! The idiom ‘dead ringer’ comes from the fact that people used to be buried with bells above the ground that were attached to strings in the coffin. Thus, if they woke up and found themselves in a coffin, they could ring the bell and people above-ground would hear the bell and dig them up. Such a person was a ‘dead ringer.”

First, we can dispense of this with logic: If the person was ‘alive’ why would they be called a ‘dead’ ringer? Also, how likely is it that anyone ever rang such a bell, provided they survived being asphyxiated? For an idiom to be derived from such a practice, we would have to presume that this actually happened. That is, people must have actually rung the bells. Perhaps they were zombies! The popularity of zombies today has more to do with this than with any true history.

After such a person was rescued from their macabre predicament, their relatives, who thought they were dead, might see them up and about and presume they were a look-alike. This is how dead ringer came to have its present meaning. Quite a journey! Like most such stories, it makes little sense and is completely untrue.

 

More Idioms Starting with D

• Drive Someone Up the Wall
• Drive Into
• Down the Rabbit Hole
• Desk Jockey
• Days Of Yore

More Dead Idioms

• Beat a Dead Horse
• Flat Broke
• Dead to Rights, have someone
• Drop Dead
• Dead End

More Ring Idioms

• Has A Ring To It
• Ring a Bell

 

References

1. Jarvie, Gordon. Bloomsbury Dictionary of Idioms. London: Bloomsbury, 2009.
2. Ammer, Christine. American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013.
3. McCarthy, Michael. Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms. Cambridge University Press, 2002
4. Ammer, Christine. American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013.
5. Jarvie, Gordon. Bloomsbury Dictionary of Idioms. London: Bloomsbury, 2009.
6. Bengelsdorf, Peter. Idioms in the News – 1,000 Phrases, Real Examples. N.p.: Amz Digital Services, 2012.