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nothing new under the sun

  1. A phrase adapted from the Book of Ecclesiastes ; the author complains frequently in the book about the monotony of life. The entire passage reads, “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”


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Idioms and Phrases

Everything has been seen before, as in Those designs take me back to the 1950s—there really is nothing new under the sun . This world-weary view was already expressed in 1382 in the Bible translation attributed to John Wycliffe's followers: “No thing under the sun is new” (Ecclesiastes 1:9).

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Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023

Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

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