Nose to the grindstone

Origin of: Nose to the grindstone

Nose to the grindstone

This expression has many variants. We have been keeping or holding our noses or other people’s to the grindstone since the early 16th century. The allusion is to the drudgery of stooping over a whetstone and sharpening tools or weapons, a common labouring practice for hundreds of years. The expression appears in John Heywood Proverbs (1546), “Hold their noses to grindstone.”