don't count your chickens before they're hatched
English
Alternative forms
- don't count your chickens before they hatch, don't count your chickens before the eggs have hatched
Etymology
First attested in English in Thomas Howell's 1570 New Sonnets and Pretty Pamphlets in the couplet "Counte not thy Chickens that vnhatched be, / Waye wordes as winde, till thou finde certaintee", possibly deriving from similar medieval and early modern Latin fables and maxims.
Proverb
don't count your chickens before they're hatched
- One should not depend upon a favorable (and typically overoptimistic) outcome to one's plans until it is certain to occur.
- Synonyms: don't get your hopes up, don't sell the skin till you have caught the bear
- [1663, [Samuel Butler], “The Second Part of Hudibras”, in Hudibras. The First and Second Parts. […], London: […] John Martyn and Henry Herringman, […], published 1678, OCLC 890163163; republished in A[lfred] R[ayney] Waller, editor, Hudibras: Written in the Time of the Late Wars, Cambridge: University Press, 1905, OCLC 963614346, canto III, page 175:
- [...] Make Fools believe in their fore-seeing / Of things before they are in Being; / To swallow Gudgeons ere th' are catch'd, / And count their Chickens ere th' are hatch'd, [...]]
Translations
one should not depend upon a favorable outcome to one's plans until it is certain to occur
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See also
- it ain't over 'til the fat lady sings
Further reading
- Gregory Y. Titelman, Random House Dictionary of Popular Proverbs and Sayings, 1996, →ISBN, p. 63.
- Jennifer Speake, ed., Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs, 6th ed., 2015, →ISBN, p. 60.