Keep Your Nose to the Grindstone
Meaning
Apply yourself conscientiously to your work.
Origin
There are two rival explanations as to the origin of this phrase. One is that it comes from the supposed habit of millers who checked that the stones used for grinding cereal weren’t overheating by putting their nose to the stone in order to smell any burning. The other is that it comes from the practice of knife grinders when sharpening blades to bend over the stone, or even to lie flat on their fronts, with their faces near the grindstone in order to hold the blades against the stone.
All the evidence is against the miller’s tale. Firstly, the stones used by millers were commonly called millstones, not grindstones. The two terms were sometimes interchanged but the distinction between the two was made at least as early as 1400, when this line was printed in Turnament Totenham:
“Ther was gryndulstones in gravy, And mylstones in mawmany.”
The language there is difficult to interpret but it certainly shows the grindstones and millstones as being distinct from each other. if the derivation was from milling, we would expect the phrase to be ‘nose to the millstone’.
A second point in favour of the tool sharpening derivation is that all the early citations refer to holding someone’s nose to the grindstone as a form of punishment. This is more in keeping with the notion of the continuous hard labour implicit in being strapped to one’s bench than it is to the occasional sniffing of ground floor by a miller.
