Why Do We Say "Two Peas in a Pod"?

If two things are like "two peas in a pod," then they’re very similar to one another (if not all but identical). But why refer to peas specifically here? And where on earth has such a peculiar expression come from?

A 16th-Century Simile

Well, like a lot of standard English similes, the origins of "two peas in a pod" lie a little further back in time than you might think. Although the Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest record of the phrase in its full form as we know it today dates from the 1840s, in truth, various versions of this saying have been in use for several centuries longer than that.

A version referring to two things being "as like as two peas," for instance, has been unearthed as far back as 1746—while way back in 1580, the Elizabethan writer, dramatist, and scholar John Lyly wrote of two things being "as like as one pease is to an other" in his classic novel, Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit. Whether Lyly coined the phrase himself or simply reused a metaphor he had already heard or read elsewhere is impossible to say without further evidence.

Mind Your Ps and Peases

Lyly’s use of the spelling pease here, incidentally, is entirely accurate for the time. A single pea was originally known as a pease in English (derived from the earlier Old English word pise), before the final "s" sound was wrongly interpreted as a plural –s, and the word erroneously cut down to pea in the 1600s. As a result, we’ve had two peas in a pod (rather than a pair of peases) ever since.

Giving Peas a Chance

No matter whether or not Lyly made this phrase up himself, why singled out peas as an example of similarity here? Well, unsurprisingly, it’s the vegetables’ near-uniform size, shape, and color that’s at least partly to blame for them being namechecked in Lyly’s phrase—while the fact that they grow in near-matching sets, all nestled in beside one another in a row inside a single pea pod, makes them a neat go-to comparison for two alike things.

Peas would have been particularly familiar to a Tudor audience, too, for whom they would have made a cheap and easy-to-grow food choice. And although in an era of supermarkets and freezer shopping we’re perhaps less used to growing and podding peas today, the phrase nonetheless still works and holds true nearly 500 years later.

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