Idiom
Chickens come home to roost
When chickens come home to roost, bad things someone did in the past come back to cause problems for them.
How people use it
People use this when consequences finally catch up with someone: debts, lies, ignored repairs or poor decisions. Common forms are "his chickens have come home to roost" and "the chickens are coming home to roost." It always concerns the results of a person's own actions, and those results are usually bad. The tone is neutral but a little pointed, sometimes with an "I told you so" feeling. It is not used for good results returning.
Also said: the chickens have come home to roost.
Examples
- He skipped every practice, and now his chickens have come home to roost before the big game.
- The company's chickens came home to roost when the cheap parts started failing.
- We ignored the leaky roof for years, and those chickens came home to roost during the storm.
Where it comes from
Chickens wander during the day but always return to their roost at night. English writers long used this as a picture for curses or wrongs coming back to the person who caused them. Chaucer expressed a similar idea in the late 1300s, comparing a curse to a bird returning to its nest, and the poet Robert Southey used the line "curses are like young chickens, they always come home to roost" in the early 1800s.
Check yourself
1. What does it mean when someone's chickens come home to roost?
Answer: Their past mistakes cause them trouble. The idiom is about bad actions bringing bad results later.
2. Which situation fits the idiom?
Answer: A driver who ignored warning lights for months finally breaks down on the highway.. Ignoring the warnings led to trouble later, which is the idiom's point.
Word game fan? See every word hiding in CHICKENS.