The story
Cows out at pasture are in no hurry. Left to themselves, they drift back toward the barn at their own slow pace, often around milking time, and waiting for them can take a good part of the day.
The saying is more than 400 years old. A 1593 phrase book for English speakers learning French, John Eliot’s Ortho-epia Gallica, has a speaker complain: “I am tied by the foote till the Cow come home.”
In the early examples, a single cow was coming home. Within about a century the cow had become cows, and no one quite knows why. Either way, the picture of a long, open-ended wait never changed.
Farm life gave the saying its timing. Dairy cows return to the barn to be milked, and a farmer waiting at the gate knows the herd will come when it pleases. Anything that lasts “till the cows come home” could go on, and on, and on.
