crocodile tears

Meaning of the phrase:

Origin of the phrase:

The phrase derives from an ancient belief that crocodiles weep while luring or consuming their victims.

The expression may have gained popularity as a result of a passage in a travel book published circa 1400, The Voyage and Travail of Sir John Maundeville: 

“In that country and by all Inde be great plenty of cockodrills, that is a manner of a long serpent, as I have said before. And in the night they dwell in the water, and on the day upon the land, in rocks and in caves. And they eat no meat in all the winter, but they lie as in a dream, as do the serpents. These serpents slay men, and they eat them weeping; and when they eat they move the over jaw, and not the nether jaw, and they have no tongue.”

The figurative version of “crocodile tears” may have made its first appearance around the mid-1500s: an account of the life of Edmund Grindal, the sixteenth-century Archbishop of Canterbury, quotes him as saying:

“I begin to fear, lest his humility…be a counterfeit humility, and his tears crocodile tears.”

Here we see an early example of crocodile tears being used to describe a display considered insincere.

In time, Mandeville’s account of the weeping crocodile also found its way into the works of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and William Shakespeare’s Othello and Henry VI.  From Othello, Act IV, Scene I, Othello convinces himself that his wife is cheating on him:

If that the earth could teem with woman’s tears,
Each drop she falls would prove a crocodile.

Here, Shakespeare uses the idea of crocodile tears as a way of feigning distress in order to lure prey into a false sense of security. This version of the expression’s meaning is also seen in Henry VI, Part 2:

Too full of tender pity, and Gloster’s show
Beguiles him as the mournful crocodile
With sorrow snares relenting passengers —

It appears that crocodiles do in fact have lachrymal glands capable of producing tears; however, these tears are shed for physiological reasons, not emotional ones. It possible that extended periods out of the water may require “weeping” in order to moisturize the reptile’s eyes. Others have speculated that, during eating, air mixes with tears from the lacrimal glands which then empty onto the eyes, making it appear as if the crocodile is weeping.