What Does Paint the Town Red Mean? First Printed in Omaha

The Times of 2 August 1838 reported a trial heard at Derby on 31 July before a special jury. The Marquis of Waterford and three friends were charged with a riot at Melton Mowbray, in Leicestershire, “on the morning of the 6th of April, 1837.”

The paper’s summary of the evidence includes a watchman named Barnes, thrown down in the street: “They then painted his face and throat with red paint. A little gentleman held the paint pot, while the Marquis used the brush and laid it on thick.” A second watchman saw Barnes’s face and throat “all over red” and “supposed he was covered with blood.”

The jury convicted all four, but only of common assault, and each was fined 100 pounds, though none of them was in court to hear it. The report, transcribed in full by the Melton history site Yesterday in Melton Mowbray, never uses the phrase.

What does paint the town red mean?

To paint the town red is to go out and celebrate loudly, usually with a night of drinking and dancing. The Oxford English Dictionary, as quoted by Grammarphobia, defines it as “to enjoy oneself flamboyantly; go on a boisterous or exuberant spree.” The phrase is American, and its earliest known printed use is from Omaha in 1874.

The Melton Mowbray story has the paint but not the phrase

A Concise Dictionary of Phrase and Fable by B.A. Phythian (1993) traces the phrase to “an actual piece of drunken vandalism by the Marquis of Waterford and a bunch of his chums,” as Word Histories quotes it.

A newspaper account on the Melton site has the party out after the Croxton Park races with “a large tin of red paint,” and the Marquis lifted up to “the figure of the Old White Swan,” whose “colour was quickly altered to red.” By July 1837, the Phrase Finder shows, the New Sporting Magazine was announcing Ackermann’s prints of these “disgraceful proceedings termed ‘sprees,’” one showing gentlemen in scarlet coats “painting the sign of the White Swan red.”

None of that coverage uses the words paint the town red. The same silence undoes the story of Marie Antoinette and “let them eat cake”, since the pamphlets that attacked her never used the line.

The earliest known printing is an Omaha boast from 1874

On 31 July 1874 the Omaha Daily Republican looked ahead to the day “when all the Iowa roads will run their trains into Omaha’s mammoth depot, and in that day, as Harry Deuel says, ‘we’ll paint the whole town red and sing the hallelujah chorus.’” That is 37 years after the Melton spree. Bonnie Taylor-Blake, a neuroscience researcher, found the passage and reported it in October 2023, according to Grammarphobia.

A looser form is older. Green’s Dictionary of Slang quotes an 1865 letter, published in Bell Irvin Wiley’s The Life of Johnny Reb (1943), whose writer hoped to “visit the Theaters may be get on a big Whope & Paint the thing red.”

The exact phrase took off in the 1880s: Grammarphobia’s authors have seen “a couple of examples from 1880, and dozens from later in the ’80s.” A few of the examples that followed:

Date	Newspaper	The line
1 Sept. 1880	Oregonian, Portland, Oregon	An ad: “Painting the town red means headache in the morning. Simmons Liver Regulator prevents it.”
3 Nov. 1881	Courier-Journal, Louisville, Kentucky	In Owenton, a man just out of jail is “likewise complimented,” meaning flogged by the town’s young men as an ex-convict had been, “for ‘painting the town red‘“
18 Jan. 1882	Weekly Register, Point Pleasant, West Virginia	A satirised legislator who “wants to paint the town red” gets “gloriously full of Mountain Dew”
10 March 1882	Semi-Weekly Interior Journal, Stanford, Kentucky	”they paint the town red together,” the OED’s first reference
July 1883	The New York Times	Democrats ride the street cars into Newark and proceed, “to use their own metaphor, to ‘paint the town red‘“

By 1884, papers were inventing origins

By September 1884 a sketch in the Wheeling Daily Intelligencer, set on a Detroit street corner, had a puzzled stranger ask: “Almost every paper I pick up has something in it about somebody painting the town red.”

Pascal Treguer’s Word Histories collects seven explanations as folk etymologies, the Melton spree among them. In one, from the Harrisburg Telegraph of November 1884, a minstrel manager says the phrase began when his advance agent covered Adrian, Michigan, in posters “printed in bright red.” Treguer found no newspaper record of the incident.

A Danbury paper credited Connecticut’s governor, Thomas Waller, quoting him telling a winning boat crew: “I hope, gentlemen, you will paint this town red.” What he told the Harvard crew in June 1883, as New Haven’s Morning Herald and Courier printed it, was a request not to: “I hope you will not, as some say you intend, paint the whole town red.” He spoke nearly nine years after the Omaha paper, the same dating problem that sinks the war stories about the word gringo.

The red-light and frontier-bullies stories have no early evidence

The frontier version was circulating by 1885. Writing to Chicago’s Daily Inter Ocean as “Johannes Factotum,” a reader claimed the phrase began “on the far frontier,” where “a set of bullies armed to the teeth” threatened “to paint the town red before the next morning.” Treguer notes that no evidence supports it.

The Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, as the Phrase Finder summarises it, links the phrase to the red-light district. Etymonline records red-light district, for an area of brothels, by 1896, and the earliest uses Wikipedia cites, from 1882 to 1894, still come after the Omaha paper. None of the early examples in the table mentions a brothel.

The choice of red is still unexplained

Grammarphobia’s authors, who have collected dozens of 1880s examples, write: “We haven’t seen any published examples that explain why the color red was used rather than, say, green or blue or orange.”

Treguer’s hypothesis is a town lit up by torches or fireworks. In November 1884 the Hawaiian Gazette reported that a Honolulu crowd “became hilarious, and it was proposed to ‘paint the town red’ by means of a torchlight procession,” and Nashville’s Daily American had Tennessee Democrats who “painted the town red with fireworks.”

A second hypothesis ties the phrase to drink. Paint could mean to drink: Green’s Dictionary of Slang records that sense from the 17th century, the century in which spirits on its own came to mean strong liquor, and in Digby Grand, an 1853 novel by George Whyte-Melville, Treguer points out, it belongs to “a real Yankee character” who says at every hotel they pass, “I guess I shall go in and paint.” Both ideas remain hypotheses.

The Marquis of Waterford and his friends really did paint doors, a watchman and an inn sign red, and a court fined each of them 100 pounds for common assault. The words the phrase books credit to them first turn up in print 37 years later in Nebraska, in a newspaper looking forward to more trains. Strictly FYI.