Find a Needle in a Haystack

Watch this on YouTube here - Hay Video - YouTube Video

Meaning:

Find a Needle in a Haystack means something is difficult to find.

“Well, that’s like finding a needle in a haystack.”

Origin:

You’ve probably lost something small before, like your keys or maybe even your phone. After searching every nook and cranny, you finally find them. Whew!

However, looking for a needle in a haystack, as the saying goes, is far more challenging. You are trying to find an object, like a small needle in this case, in a large stack of hay. This can be quite hard, if not impossible for some people. The needle and hay are so similar, that it can be easily overlooked.

This saying and others around the same idea have been used for hundreds of years in our language to express difficulty finding something, one of the first written records of a similar saying goes

But the first written record where the phrase was the same as what we used today was in The Complete Works of Washington Irving in 1834 reads:

“If I want to find any particular article, it is, in the language of an humble but expressive saying, — ‘looking for a needle in a haystack.’“

Example:

Today we still use the phrase to state that what we are looking for seems impossible or very hard to find, and example sentence it:

“We spent two hours looking for you at the festival, but it was like trying to find a needle in a haystack.”

Watch this on YouTube here - Hay Video - YouTube Video

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