Wild Goose Chase

A "wild goose chase" describes a search or pursuit that is pointless, hopeless, or wastes time and effort chasing something unattainable. This page explores the origin of the phrase and how it evolved from a horse-racing term into one of the most widely used idioms in the English language.

How to Use This Page

1. Read the meaning above to confirm you understand how the phrase is used.
2. Read the historical section to trace the phrase back to its earliest recorded use.
3. Check the modern examples to see the phrase in different everyday contexts.

The History

The phrase is widely credited to William Shakespeare, who used it in "Romeo and Juliet" (1597). In a witty exchange between Romeo and Mercutio, Mercutio uses "wild-goose chase" to describe a prolonged back-and-forth of wordplay, implying a fruitless and meandering contest. This is the earliest known use of the phrase in print in the sense of a pointless pursuit.

However, the term had a somewhat different meaning before Shakespeare. In the sixteenth century, a "wild goose chase" referred to a specific type of horse race in which a lead horse set a course and other horses had to follow its exact path, much like geese flying in formation. The course was unpredictable and difficult to follow, which made the race chaotic and erratic. This sense of an erratic, unpredictable path contributed to the figurative meaning of a fruitless, directionless pursuit.

Geese themselves are notoriously difficult to herd and catch. The image of chasing wild geese, which scatter in unpredictable directions and rarely cooperate, strengthened the metaphor over time. By the eighteenth century, the phrase had fully settled into its modern meaning of a futile or hopeless search.

How It Is Used Today

In casual conversation, someone might say "Trying to find a parking space at the shopping centre on a Saturday is always a wild goose chase." The phrase conveys both the effort involved and the low chance of success.

In a workplace context, a manager might say "We spent three days chasing that lead, but it turned out to be a complete wild goose chase. The supplier never had the product in stock." It signals wasted resources and a dead end.

In journalism and fiction, the phrase often appears when a character or investigator follows a misleading trail. A detective novel might describe a series of false leads as "sending the inspector on a wild goose chase across the city."

Related Idioms

"Fool's errand" describes a similarly pointless task, usually one assigned with no realistic chance of success. "Barking up the wrong tree" refers to pursuing the wrong target or making a mistaken assumption. "Chasing shadows" conveys the idea of pursuing something insubstantial and impossible to catch. All of these share the core meaning of wasted effort directed at the wrong goal.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where does the phrase "wild goose chase" come from? The phrase appears in Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" in 1597, making it the earliest known written use in its modern sense. It likely derives from a type of erratic horse race popular in the sixteenth century, in which horses followed a lead horse along an unpredictable course.

Does a wild goose chase always involve literal searching? No. While it often describes a search for something, the phrase can also describe any prolonged, fruitless effort. It can apply to negotiations, debates, projects, or any activity that consumes effort without producing results.

Is "wild goose chase" used in British English? Yes, it is entirely standard in British English and widely used in American, Australian, and Irish English as well. It is one of the idioms that has remained consistent across different varieties of the language.

Can you send someone on a wild goose chase deliberately? Yes. The phrase is sometimes used to describe a deliberate misdirection. A character in a story might "send someone on a wild goose chase" by providing false information to keep them occupied while something else takes place.

The race the manual sets out

Gervase Markham's A Discource of Horsmanshippe, printed in 1593, gives the rules of a race called the wild-goose chase. The leading rider sets the course and the rider behind must follow it, holding close enough that his horse's head almost touches the leader's flank. The leader then turns sharply to one side and repeats the turn, and Markham says each turn throws the other rider at least twenty or thirtie yardes behind, which is between 18.3 and 27.4 metres.

The course itself, in Markham's spelling, is most vsually twelue score to bee twentie score. On the ordinary value of a score, which is twenty, that runs from 240 to 400 of whatever unit the race was measured in, and 219 to 366 metres if the unit is the yard. Markham also sets the law of the match, which is that a horse overtaken by twenty score at the first turn has lost.

The name comes from the formation. The follower tracks the leader the way a goose tracks the bird in front of it, and the point of the race is that the leader chooses a course the follower cannot predict.

The distances repay a second look, because they say how much the turn was worth. Each turn buys the leader between 20 and 30 yards, and the course runs between 240 and 400 of the units Markham uses. One turn therefore gains between 5 and 12.5 per cent of the course: 30 yards out of 240 is 12.5 per cent, and 20 yards out of 400 is 5 per cent.

How a first recorded use is dated

A phrase recorded in a play of 1592 and a race recorded in a manual of 1593 are two dates of the same kind, and it helps to know what that kind is. Each one is the earliest point at which a printed book or a surviving manuscript shows the phrase or the practice. Neither is the point at which the phrase or the practice began.

Two gaps sit behind every early date of this sort. A play is written before it is performed and performed before it is printed, so a text printed in 1597 can carry language in use several years earlier, and the 1592 date in the phrase literature is a conventional estimate of the composition rather than a printing date. A horsemanship manual records a race that riders were running before anyone wrote the rules down, so 1593 is the date of the description and not the date of the race.

The practical consequence for this page is that no source can say which of the two senses came first. Both dates are late by an unknown margin, the margins need not be equal, and the surviving record does not contain the fact that would settle it.

Dating the play against the manual

Mercutio's line in Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, Scene 4, is the earliest use of the phrase in its figurative sense that the standard references record. Mercutio answers Romeo's line about switching and spurring, and the exchange is about a contest of wits rather than a horse race, which makes the figurative sense the earlier of the two in the surviving record.

The dating is where the two accounts sit awkwardly. The phrase literature dates the play to 1592, and the play was first printed in 1597. Markham's manual is dated 1593. So the figurative use is recorded a year before the only detailed description of the race that the phrase is said to name.

Etymonline handles that gap by describing the play's use as a figurative use of an earlier and unrecorded literal sense, and that phrase carries the whole weight of the usual explanation. The racing sense is older than the play by assumption, because the book describing it did not appear until after the play was being performed. An earlier record of the race, if one exists, has not been produced.

Between the play and the dictionary

By 1811 the racing sense had dropped out of the language entirely. Francis Grose's A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue defines the phrase as a tedious uncertain pursuit, like the following a flock of wild geese, who are remarkably shy. That definition keeps the bird and drops the horse, and it matches the sense in use now.

So the phrase has two documented lives: a contest of wits in a play of 1592, and a hopeless search in a dictionary of 1811. The horse race sits between them in the record, described once, in a manual printed a year after the play.

What the dated record settles

Settled: the phrase is in print by 1592 in its figurative sense, the race named by the phrase is documented in print from 1593, and the modern sense of a futile search is the one Grose records in 1811.

Open: whether the phrase named the race or the race took the phrase's name. Both readings fit the dates that survive. If the race came first, its records are lost and the play is the earliest trace of a term already in use. If the play came first, the race is named after it and the usual explanation has the order backwards.

A reader who needs the origin for a piece of writing can give the play, the manual, the Grose definition and the gap between the play and the manual, and leave the direction of the borrowing as the open question it is. The history above gives the play as 1597, which is its first printing, while the phrase literature dates the composition to 1592, so the two dates in circulation refer to different events rather than to a disagreement about the play.

Where the dates and the quotations come from

The 1592 date and the line from Romeo and Juliet come from Gary Martin's Phrase Finder entry for wild goose chase, which cites the play as the first recorded use, and the scene text is available in full at shakespeare.mit.edu under Act 2, Scene 4. The Markham passage, including the course distance and the twenty or thirty yards, is quoted in the same entry from A Discource of Horsmanshippe, 1593. The Grose definition is from A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 1811, which Phrase Finder also cites. The note about an earlier unrecorded literal sense is from Douglas Harper's Online Etymology Dictionary entry for wild goose chase.

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