Underdog Stories / Everyday expressions

What Does Go Against the Grain Mean, and Where Did It Come From?

What does go against the grain mean and where did it come from? Follow the phrase from a Roman food fight to a woodshop story nobody can quite prove.

By Brett Hanson · Underdog Podcasts · October 7, 2026

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A Roman crowd wants food. Its leaders want votes. And in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, one politician tells the crowd what to say about a man they have just chosen for office. That is where the earliest recorded figurative use of “against the grain” appears. It means going against what feels natural or expected. The phrase has since grown to cover people who take an unusual path.

That leaves a tempting question: which grain? On the Appraise The Phrase episode “Go Against The Grain,” guest Kayla pictured the grooves in wood and a splinter. Mario Hines said the wood origin was a rumor nobody could prove. The play offers a different image close at hand: Rome has a fight over grain people can eat.

What does go against the grain mean and where did it come from?

If you go against the grain, you do something that runs counter to the usual way of doing things. You might turn down a job everyone expects you to take. You might also do something that feels wrong for you, even if everyone else thinks it is ordinary. Both senses are still in use. Cambridge’s definition stresses doing something you would not usually do; Gary Martin’s Phrase Finder gives the older sense of going against one’s own inclination.

Twenty, the episode’s co-host, pictured someone handed a map who still took the roundabout route. Kayla saw someone who thinks or acts outside the norm. Different pictures. Both point to resistance to an expected course.

The earliest recorded figurative use cited by Phrase Finder is in Coriolanus, a play often dated to around 1608. Shakespeare did not write the modern wording “go against the grain” in the famous passage. His character says that people were made “against the grain” to vote for a candidate. The text first appeared in print in the 1623 First Folio. A date for a play’s writing and a date for its first surviving printing are different things.

Nor does the record prove Shakespeare invented the expression. Someone could have said it earlier and left no trace. What survives gives us a starting point for the phrase’s written history, with a Roman politician making unusually careful use of it.

Where does the phrase appear in Coriolanus?

The line is in Act 2, Scene 3. That matters because Mario said on the episode that he had found conflicting scene numbers and had not checked a copy himself. The Folger Shakespeare Library’s text places the exchange after citizens have given Coriolanus their votes. Sicinius and Brutus, two officials who oppose him, work to turn them around.

Sicinius supplies the crowd with an account of what happened. He tells them to say they chose Coriolanus under the officials’ orders rather than from their “own true affections.” Their minds, he says, were on what they had to do instead of what they should do. That made them “against the grain” to vote for him. Then Sicinius tells them to lay the fault on the officials.

The excuse is neat. It lets the voters take back their support while blaming the men now urging them to do so. Mario noticed the joke inside it: the people are being coached to describe their earlier vote as something they did against their wishes. Their new account of those wishes comes from someone else.

That does not make the phrase mean “pretend to rebel.” In Sicinius’s speech, it describes an act at odds with a person’s true feelings. The sly part lies in who gets to speak for those feelings. Brutus follows Sicinius’s instructions by telling the citizens to blame the officials freely. These men are remarkably willing to take the fall, provided they get the result they want.

Why does grain matter to the play?

“There's a rumor out there that this phrase is about wood that nobody can prove.”
— Mario Hines, on Appraise The Phrase

Before anyone seeks a consul’s vote, Rome has a food problem. The play opens with hungry citizens in revolt. They believe the city has grain stored away while they struggle to eat. When the Roman leader Martius hears what the people want, another character tells him they seek corn at their own price. In the play, “corn” is food grain. It is a hard thing to keep out of a political argument when people are hungry.

Later, Martius has won the name Coriolanus through battle. He argues against giving the people corn for free, saying they have not earned it. His contempt for them helps wreck his bid to become consul. The quarrel about food runs through the same story as Sicinius’s “against the grain” line.

Mario thought Shakespeare might have enjoyed putting that phrase into a play so full of grain. Twenty agreed. It is a good reading of the scene, and more fun than picturing a stray bit of lumber wandering into Rome. It remains a reading, though. The play cannot tell us which image Shakespeare had in mind when he wrote the line.

The food dispute also keeps the expression from sounding like a simple badge of courage. Coriolanus opposes the crowd, yet the crowd has sound reasons to worry about food. Sicinius opposes Coriolanus while telling other people what to say. Everybody can claim to be pushing against something. The question is who bears the cost.

Does the expression come from woodworking?

You can see why that story sticks. Wood has a grain: its fibers run in a direction. Plane it the wrong way and the surface may tear instead of lying smooth. Kayla reached for that picture before the episode got to the origin. Twenty said he had not thought of wood until she mentioned it. The image does the work quickly.

There is historical support for grain as a word for the pattern of wood fibers. Etymonline dates that sense to the 1560s, before the usual date given for Coriolanus. It also presents carpentry as the source of the metaphor. That is a plausible account. It is harder to establish as the certain origin of Shakespeare’s line.

Martin, who wrote the Phrase Finder entry Mario discussed, points out the gap: the early citations he found do not mention wood. He allows that Shakespeare may have had timber in mind. He does not claim the record proves it. The distinction is small and worth keeping. A wood plane shows how the phrase could make sense; it cannot show what one writer was picturing.

There is a wrinkle in the dates, too. Etymonline gives 1650 for “against the grain” as a carpentry metaphor, while Phrase Finder identifies Shakespeare’s earlier figurative passage. The accounts should not be flattened into one tidy origin date. We have a surviving line in a play first printed in 1623, an older sense of wood grain, and no note from Shakespeare explaining the link.

Is going against the grain a good thing?

It hands out no grades. It tells you a choice runs against the usual course. On the episode, Twenty said his image of a salmon swimming upstream did not make the fish right or wrong. A useful check, especially when someone calls themselves a rebel before doing much of anything.

Kayla had a less showy example. She said she had expected to follow a corporate career path. After Tulsa lost a Black-owned bookstore, she started Kanara as a pop-up bookstore instead of waiting to open a permanent shop. She took books to places where people already gathered. Friends had trouble picturing a bookstore without the usual walls.

Mario called that a choice against the grain. Kayla said she embraced the description, then gave a reason beyond being different: she wanted her shop to center readers and authors often pushed aside. Her change of course had a purpose. That makes the phrase more useful than a label someone puts on themselves before they move.

This also shows how little an origin story can settle. Kayla’s first thought was a splinter. The oldest cited scene, though, puts the words in the mouth of a Roman official coaching a crowd. Her shop needs neither a carpenter nor a tribune to make sense. Sicinius, meanwhile, probably would have liked the pop-up idea only if he could tell customers why they had come.