If you 'wipe the floor with' someone, you defeat them easily. Searching on Google, I can only see explanations of what this idiom means, but not how it came about. What caused people to start using this phrase in this way?
Learn English – Etymology of ‘wipe the floor with’
etymologyidioms
Related Question
- Learn English – Why do we say that one can “talk the hind legs off a donkey”
- Learn English – Why does one “laugh to see a pudding crawl”
- Learn English – Etymology of “humbug”
- Learn English – How did “at once” get to be used to mean “immediately”
- Learn English – “Never say die?”
- Learn English – Why do we say “to fall in love”? Is it something unwished for
- Learn English – What’s the origin of “rob someone blind”
- Learn English – What’s the origin of “strike a chord with…”
Best Answer
According to A dictionary of slang, jargon and cant by Barrère and Leland (1897), it means that "one man has thrashed another so completely as to have taken him like a broom or mop, and swept or cleaned the floor with him."
(Rather cheekily, both usage examples there are from poems by Leland himself.)