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wrong side of the bed

wrong side of the bed

2 7.3
A time when someone is in a bad mood for no clear reason
  • idiom
  • Informal
translation icon : levantarse de mal humor
  • I got up on the wrong side of the bed
  • wrong side of the bed this morning

I got up on the wrong side of the bed, I'm not a morning person.

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Examples

  • Do you ever have those days where you literally get up on the wrong side of the bed and you're like mad at yourself for being upset at things?

  • "Did he get up on the wrong side of the bed?" Charly laughed.

    Fiction book (1993)
  • Somebody got up on the wrong side of the bed.

  • Did someone get up on the wrong side of the bed?

    Blog text (15)
  • And Trump woke up on the wrong side of the bed, it appears, and decided, never mind.

  • l woke up on the wrong side of the bed.

  • I got up on the wrong side of the bed, I'm not a morning person.

  • It could be somebody woke up on the wrong side of the bed.

  • Did you get up on the wrong side of the bed today? You seem grumpy.

  • After waking up on the wrong side of the bed, she decided to have a quiet day.

Antonyms

Feeling happy and cheerful

How Irritable

furious
238 3.0
angry
1.0
irritable
32 3.7
wrong side of the bed
  • Informal
2 7.3
grumpy
76 1.7
calm
735 1.0

Surface Forms

Morphology

wrong + side + of + the + bed

The literal parts ('wrong' + 'side' + 'bed') describe a physical location and do not by themselves signal a person's mood, so a B1 learner who only knows the constituents would unlikely infer 'be in a bad mood'. However, the mapping from getting up on a particular side to being irritable is a conventionalized metaphor and many languages have parallel expressions, so there is a partially inferable connection rather than complete opacity.

Etymology

Wrong side of the bed comes from the old idea that getting up on the wrong side of the bed gives you a bad or clumsy start to the day. So the picture of starting the day badly explains why the phrase means 'to be in a bad mood'.