Word Story 4:

Meaning: A perceived grievance or sense of inferiority.

Origin: The word chip has several meanings; the one that we are concerned with here is the earliest known of these, namely 'a small piece of wood, as might be chopped, or chipped, from a larger block'. The phrase 'a chip on one's shoulder' is reported as originating with the nineteenth century U.S. practice of spoiling for a fight by carrying a chip of wood on one's shoulder, daring others to knock it off with a belligerent attitude. There's no evidence at all to suggest 'a chip on one's shoulder' existed as a figurative phrase until the 19th century. The phrase is first recorded by an English author in the 1930s in fact, in Somerset Maugham's Gentleman in the Parlour:

"He was a man with a chip on his shoulder. Everyone seemed in a conspiracy to slight or injure him."

The confrontational challenge to knock a chip of wood off someone's shoulder does after all appear to be the correct derivation. Circumstantial evidence is all we have to go on here, but that clearly points to a 19th century US coinage. The earliest printed citations that I can find that refer to chips on shoulders are all from America, which the OED states quite firmly to be the source of the phrase. For example:

The American writer and historian James Kirke Paulding's Letters from the South, 1817:

"A man rode furiously by on horseback, and swore he'd be d----d if he could not lick any man who dared to crook his elbow at him. This, it seems, is equivalent to throwing the glove in days of yore, or to the boyish custom of knocking a chip off the shoulder."

In 1830 the New York newspaper The Long Island Telegraph printed this:

"When two churlish boys were determined to fight, a chip would be placed on the shoulder of one, and the other demanded to knock it off at his peril."

The actual phrase 'chip on his shoulder' appears a little later, in the Weekly Oregonian 1855:

"Leland, in his last issue, struts out with a chip on his shoulder, and dares Bush to knock it off."

In Context: That bully walks around with a chip on his shoulder.

Think About It: How is a shoulder chip created in the first place?