Buzz
After dedicating an entire weekend to scrubbing every inch of your apartment, you might call it spick-and-span: so spotless that it feels brand new. The full version of the phrase is actually spick and span new, although unless you’re an etymologist, it might not clarify the origin of the term.
Long before spick and span new, there was span-new, a term at least as old as the early 1300s. The Oxford English Dictionary traces its roots to the Old Norse word spán-nýr, where nýr means new and spán means chip (as in a wood chip). Essentially, as Pascal Tréguer outlined on his word histories blog, span-new referred to something “as new as a freshly cut wooden chip.”
Spick, on the other hand, is thought to have originated from several old terms meaning nail—words that are also linked to spike. Examples include the Middle Swedish spijk, Dutch spijker, and Old Norse spik (which more precisely means splinter). In Dutch and Flemish, phrases like spiksplinternieuw and spikspeldernieuw were used just as span-new was in English: to describe something so pristine it must have been freshly made. For instance, “a ship freshly constructed, with brand-new nails and timber,” as Michael Quinion discussed on his blog World Wide Words.
At some point, English speakers merged those expressions with span-new to form spick and span new. The earliest known written instance of this was by Sir Thomas North in his 1579 translation of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, where he wrote: 'They were all in goodly gilt armours, and braue purple cassocks apon them, spicke, and spanne new.'
Eventually, the word new was dropped. The first known instance of this (again, in writing) was by Samuel Pepys, who, in a 1665 diary entry, described his acquaintance Lady Batten as 'walking through the dirty lane with new spick-and-span white shoes.'
Though the phrase initially referred to things that were truly new, its meaning evolved over time. Today, calling something 'spick-and-span' doesn’t necessarily mean it’s brand new—just that it appears that way. On the other hand, brand-new still retains its original meaning of being truly new, though the brand in this context has nothing to do with stores or companies.
