Learn English – Don’t grass me up!

british-englishetymology

"Grass", in British English, can be used as a verb or a noun to describe a police informer or the actions of said informer. Oxford gives:

noun: British informal, A police informer.
verb: British informal, Inform the police of someone’s criminal activities or plans

The term "grass" has been widened in its usage to also mean "reporting someone to an authority figure":

Don't eat those biscuits or I'll grass you up to mother!

Oxford suggests that the term may have come from rhyming slang, namely grasshopper/copper. Etymonline gives nothing.

Can one of our resident etymologists provide an insight into when and where this first came into use and whether there are any other possibilities aside from the rhyming slang version above?

Best Answer

The Phrase Finder explores three different possible origins in the following extract:

Grass up:

  • In 2005, British newspapers picked up on a story about a burglar who had stolen cash, jewellery and an African Grey parrot from a house near Hungerford, Berkshire. David Carlile, widely described in the press as 'feather-brained', explained to the police that he knew that African Greys could talk and he didn't want the bird to 'grass him up'. Presumably, had the parrot been a Norwegian Blue, he would have left it to pine for the fiords.

First assumption:

  • 'Grassing up' has been a commonly used expression in the UK since the mid 20th century, but is less common elsewhere. The first known use of 'grass' in that context is Arthur Gardner's Tinker's Kitchen, 1932, which defined a grass as "an informer".

  • Grass was a well-enough established word in the 1980s to have spawned 'supergrass', that is, a republican sympathiser who later 'turned Queen's evidence' and informed on the IRA, and which gave the Brit-pop band Supergrass their name in the 1990s.

Second assumption:

  • There is another route to the word and this is via rhyming slang. Farmer and Henley's 1893 Dictionary of Slang defines 'grasshopper' as 'copper', that is, policeman. The theory is that a 'grass' is someone who works for the police and so has become a surrogate 'copper'. The rhyming slang was certainly believed in 1950 by the lexicographer Paul Tempest, when he wrote Lag's lexicon: a comprehensive dictionary and encyclopaedia of the English prison to-day:

    • "Grasser. One who gives information. A 'squealer’ or ‘squeaker'. The origin derives from rhyming slang: grasshopper - copper; a 'grass' or 'grasser' tells the 'copper' or policeman."

  • That comes only a few years after the term grass was coined and there seems little reason to doubt it as the derivation. The original users of the term 'grass up' were from the London underworld and would have certainly been better acquainted with rhyming slang than the works of Virgil.

Third assumption:

  • Some have also theorised that the term 'shop', meaning 'give information that leads to an arrest', derives from the same source, that is, that, as 'grass' derives from 'grasshopper', then so does 'shopper'. The earliest known use of shop in that context dates from around the same time as the emergence of grasshopper. The issue of the magazine Tit-Bits for May, 1899 includes:

    • "[He] volunteered for a fiver to 'shop' his pals."

  • As far as we know, African Greys don't go shopping.

The second and third hypotheses are supported also by the Word Detective:

  • The use of “grass” as British slang for a police informer dates back to the 1930s, and is apparently a short form of the slang term “grasshopper,” meaning the same thing. “Grasshopper” itself is rhyming slang (“a secret language” in which words rhyme with a hidden meaning) for either “copper” (i.e., a police officer) or “shopper,” one who “shops” (sells) information to the police.
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