to smell the barn
- idiom
- Informal
:
sentir el final
- As the days grew shorter, the team could smell the barn and worked even harder to finish.
Examples
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I can smell the barn as we approach home!
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With the end of the semester in sight, students began to smell the barn.
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The runners started to smell the barn as the finish line came into view.
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After weeks of traveling, they finally smelled the barn.
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After five weeks and 400 miles of paddling, I'm like a horse that smells the barn.
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As the deadline for the project approached, she felt like a runner who smells the barn.
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With the final exam just around the corner, he could smell the barn after months of hard work.
How Close
Surface Forms
Morphology
The sense is partially derivable: knowing 'smell' and 'barn' allows a learner to infer detecting a barn by smell and thus being physically close to it, which maps onto the idea of nearing home. However, the jump from that literal detection to the broader idiomatic meaning 'anticipate the end of a journey/situation' is metaphorical and possibly regional, so a B1 learner may not reliably predict the full idiomatic sense without prior exposure.
Etymology
The phrase smell the barn may come from a farm image: animals heading home first catch the smell of the barn as they get near. So to smell the barn means 'to sense the end' or to feel the finish is close.