“More Than You Can Shake a Stick at.”

When someone says they have “more than you can shake a stick at” what are they saying? This is an idiom I don’t remember hearing previous to meeting my husband but one that he uses on occasion. When I asked him what it meant he said, “It means you have a whole lot of them.”  When I inquired as to where the phrase came from, he didn’t know.

I have since gone online to research this idiom’s meaning and origin. According to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, this term means “more than anyone can count: a lot.”  From what I found online, there are numerous theories as to its origin. My favorite theories suggest that the stick this phrase refers to a shepherd’s staff. Shepherds shake their staff to tell the sheep which way they should go. When they have more sheep than they can control, it is understood that they have “more than you can shake a stick at” (chroniclelive.co.uk). Another theory is that a shepherd might shake his staff at predators in an attempt to scare them off but sometimes there may be an abundance of predators “more than you can shake a stick at” (english.stackexchange.com).

The earliest known use of the phrase “shake a stick at” referring to a substantial number occurred in 1818 in the Lancaster Journal of Pennsylvania. It printed “We have in Lancaster as many Taverns as you can shake a stick at.”