The phrase working for peanuts is common (at least in American English) to indicate that someone is compensated very little. The word peanuts is defined by Oxford Online as
(peanuts) informal A paltry thing or amount, especially a very small amount of money:
he pays peanuts
Etymonline offers only this
peanuts "trivial sum" is from 1934.
A search of ngrams for work for peanuts, works for peanuts and working for peanuts yields nothing apposite before 1939 (and that reference provided no guidance).
Can anyone offer insight into how peanuts came mean little money?
Best Answer
Harold Wentworth & Stuart Flexner, Dictionary of American Slang (1960) asserts that peanut has had the slang sense of smallness or insignificance for a long time, but that the plural form peanuts in the slang sense of a small amount of money is far more recent:
Robert Chapman & Barbara Kipfer, Dictionary of American Slang, third edition (1995) push back the origin date of peanuts in the sense of "A small amount of money" to 1934.
The earliest instance of "working for peanuts" that a Google Books search finds comes from Edmund Cooke, "Daily Bread" in Appleton's Magazine (August 1907), about a kid selling peanuts and soda pop in the stands at a baseball game:
But Wentworth & Flexner seems to be correct that the phrase "working for peanuts" did not become idiomatically common until the early years of World War II. For example, from a glossary of slang terms in Punch (1939[?]) [combined snippets]:
And from Ray Brock, Nor Any Victory (1942) [combined snippets]:
Although Wentworth & Flexner says that peanut had the slang meaning "Unimportant; little esteemed" by around 1840, none of the nineteenth-century slang dictionaries I checked listed the word in that sense. Perhaps the most interesting slang use of peanut in that century was as part of the term peanut politics. John Farmer, Americanisms—Old and New (1889) has this entry for the term:
Update (April 7, 2018)
A series of Elephind searches for "work/works/worked/working for peanuts" yields one interesting and fairly early instance in which the expression is used in its literal sense. From "A Diet Farmer's Experience," in the Claude [Texas] News (April 2, 1937):
"I nearly always stay on top with peanuts. I plow them up when mature, then drive down the rows and thresh off the nuts over the back end gate of the wagon as the vines are shaken and piled. I bale the vines for hay, Those not threshed are baled with the nuts on. Neighbors sometimes need peanut seed or want them for eating purposes and are glad to exchange work for peanuts or buy them outright.
A flurry of figurative instances of the phrase begins in 1940. Here are the four earliest such instances drawn from Elephind searches.
From "Endowment Dilemma," in the Stanford [California] Daily (March 5, 1940):
From Harrison Carroll, "Behind the Scenes in Hollywood." in the [Honolulu, Hawaii] Nippu Jiji (March 14, 1941):
From "Zivic Favored Over Cochrane in Title Go," in the San Bernardino [California] Sun (July 28, 1941):
And from Harlan Reed, "Tough Guy," in the San Bernardino [California] Sun (August 24, 1941):