Out of sorts

To be out of sorts is to be unwell or under the weather. Some sources maintain it comes from the world of printing during the 1600s when sorts meant the boxes of individual letters used by printers in their printing trays. If these letters were mixed up they were said to be out of sorts and very tiresome for the printer who would be out of sorts. The problem with this is that out of sorts appears in Heywood’s Proverbs published in 1562, at least one hundred years before this alleged printers’ usage. For Heywood out of sorts simply meant disordered, from which it is a very small step to feeling out of sorts.