Buzz
It’s easy to think that describing something as a wild goose chase means it’s as hopeless or as challenging as chasing after a wild goose. However, this isn’t exactly the case. The original wild goose chase had nothing to do with actually chasing wild geese. Instead, it referred to a pursuit (or being pursued) that was *like* chasing a wild goose.
The earliest known written reference to a wild goose chase (we’ll dive deeper into this shortly) comes from William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, penned sometime in the 1590s. Mercutio says to Romeo:
“Nay, if our wits run the wild-goose chase, I am done, for thou hast more of the wild-goose in one of thy wits than, I am sure, I have in my whole five. Was I with you there for the goose?”
Mercutio is grumbling about losing a battle of wits (part of a conversation that includes one of Shakespeare’s most provocative jokes) to Romeo while they stroll the streets of Verona, waiting to meet with Juliet’s nurse. Here, he seems to be likening their ‘hunt’ for the perfect quip in their playful, back-and-forth banter to what seems like a real goose hunt.
Because this was considered the earliest written reference to the phrase, the origin of wild goose chase has long been attributed to Shakespeare, often viewed as just another of his many literary creations. However, it’s more likely that Shakespeare was playing on an already established term with roots in hunting with horses, not hunting birds.
Take a look at these lines from the poem “The Mother’s Blessing,” written in 1602 by English author Nicholas Breton:
“Esteeme a horse, according to his paceBut loose no wagers on a wilde goose chase”
Although Breton wrote this poem about a decade after Shakespeare completed Romeo and Juliet, it’s believed that Breton’s work hints at the phrase’s original meaning. Originally, a wild goose chase referred to a horse race where a leading rider would take off across a field, creating an especially difficult, winding course through the land. A second rider would then follow, precisely retracing the first rider's path and mimicking each twist and turn, no matter how challenging, as they pursued the first. A third rider would then follow the second, and a fourth would continue the chain, until an entire group of riders was following each other through the countryside, retracing the leader’s steps.
This style of horse racing—likely used as a way to challenge younger or less skilled riders’ horsemanship—came to be called a wild goose chase because each rider in the group closely follows the one ahead, much like geese flying in a neat V shape across the sky. It’s believed that this was the original wild goose chase, before confusion over the phrase’s wording—was it a wild-goose chase or a wild goose-chase?—led to the later meaning, as used by Shakespeare.
Both meanings coexisted for about another century (the Oxford English Dictionary has discovered a reference to a horse-riding wild goose chase as late as the 1690s) before the older sense began to fade, and Shakespeare’s interpretation took over. Eventually, the older meaning was forgotten entirely; even Samuel Johnson overlooked it in his 1755 Dictionary of the English Language, where he simply defined wildgoosechase as “a pursuit of something as unlikely to be caught as the wildgoose.” And the surprising horse-racing origins of the term have since remained buried in history.
