Why Do We Say "Saved By the Bell"?

If you’re “saved by the bell,” that means you experience a last-minute reprieve or intervention that saves you from some kind of potentially difficult, dangerous, or downright unpleasant development. But where does this phrase come from?

Does “Saved By the Bell” Come From Graveyards?

There’s a popular theory about the origin of this expression, which claims that it alludes to the old-timey practice of burying people in coffins fitted with cords or strings connected to a bell above them on the graveside. 

Should the unfortunate person inside the coffin happen to have been buried alive, the theory claims, then all they had to do was pull on the strings, and the sound of the ringing bell would alert anyone aboveground to what was going on below. The person inside the coffin, ultimately, would be quite literally “saved by the bell.”

It’s an ingenious idea—and one that has likewise been recycled as the potential origin of the expression “dead ringer.” Alas, in neither case is this actually true. 

It’s certainly true that these graveyard alert systems existed. They were properly known as “safety coffins,” and various versions of them have been designed and patented since the 1860s at least. 

But unfortunately there’s no evidence of this phrase ever having been used in this context (and in fact, there’s little evidence at all of anyone actually being saved using a safety coffin, outside of the odd scary movie scene). 

Additionally, while the earliest reference to this bit of postmortem Victorian tech dates from 1868, the earliest recorded reference to being “saved by the bell” dates from almost three decades later—from the entirely unrelated world of boxing. 

Where “Saved By the Bell” Really Comes From

The bell in “saved by the bell,” ultimately, is the bell that is rung at the end of a boxing round. The phrase’s implication of a last-minute reprieve, meanwhile, alludes not to someone who has been buried alive and is running out of oxygen, but to an exhausted fighter being fortuitously given a moment’s respite. 

A boxer who appears to be on the verge of being knocked out and losing his fight, therefore, can be “saved by the bell” rung to mark the end of the round, giving him a moment to sit and recover in his corner ahead of the next one.

As for a dead ringer? Well, it comes from the equally competitive world of horse racing, in which a ringer was a substitute horse swapped out for a lookalike in order to deceive bettors and bookies. 

The “dead” in a dead ringer, ultimately, has nothing to do with being deceased and is instead just an intensifier—the same “dead” that might appear in an expression like “dead center,” “dead tired,” or “dead right.”

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