Rat race

The Oxford English Dictionary traces the earliest known use of rat race to the late 1700s, in a sporting context.1 In nineteenth-century England, actual races between rats were staged as gambling entertainment, with the animals decorated in colored ribbons to distinguish them. An 1848 account in The Sporting Review described a rat race held in a public house in Shepherd's Market, where four rats competed for a sweepstakes before an audience of spectators.2

By the 1930s, the phrase had detached from literal animals. It appeared as military slang for follow-the-leader exercises among fighter pilots, and in Louisville, Kentucky, it named a popular dance.3 The metaphorical sense of a competitive, self-defeating struggle appeared by 1939, when Christopher Morley used it in his novel Kitty Foyle.4

The phrase gained traction in the 1950s as corporate white-collar work expanded. William H. Whyte used it in The Organization Man (1956), noting that employees described their professional lives with words like "treadmill" and "rat race."5

The image drew power from two sources simultaneously. Laboratory psychology had made the maze-running rat a standard experimental subject by the 1920s, and the spectacle of a rat running through a researcher's maze, performing tasks designed by someone else, for rewards selected by someone else, mapped precisely onto the feeling the phrase captured. A physicist named Samuel Goudsmit used it in 1949 to describe how the pace of postwar science had changed his profession from contemplation to frenzy.6

In French, the expression métro, boulot, dodo (commute, work, sleep) captures a similar cycle without the animal imagery. In Japanese, the concept of the salaryman treadmill carries the same implication of repetition without progress. The English phrase has entered dozens of languages, carrying the particular suggestion that the race is not merely exhausting but designed by someone other than the person running it.