We can sweep the floor, sweep the board, sweep the stakes, and sweep the series – and if we're lucky, it might even be called a "clean sweep."
It’s that last one that sparked a question from our listener, Tom Gryniewicz: "When we say a political party had a 'clean sweep' in the election, what were we originally sweeping to get to that saying?"
If you go back far enough, you’ll find that it's the floor that's being swept. However, to understand the phrase "clean sweep," we'll be looking to baseball.
The irregular verb "sweep" replaced the older verb "swope.” By the time we hit Middle English, we had "sweep" with its past tense "swept," possibly modeled after verbs like "sleep/slept" and "creep/crept." While "sweeped" might occasionally pop up, some language commentators would prefer you don’t use it.
Originally, "sweep" referred to clearing something away with a broom or brush. Over time, the word took on a broader, metaphorical meaning: to sweep away both physical and abstract things. By the 1600s, "sweep" had come to mean "to gather" or "collect in one stroke." This is the origin of the phrase "sweep the stakes," and later, "sweepstakes."
By the 1700s, “sweepstakes” came to refer to a prize that you win in a contest or a race in which the winner gets all the stakes contributed by all the competitors. Later, it came to refer to the contest itself, winner takes all. Now, the noun “sweep” can refer to the act of sweeping, and you can do something in one sweep.
Here’s where baseball comes in. In 2022, linguist and lexicographer Ben Zimmer wrote a piece about “clean sweep” in The Wall Street Journal. As Zimmer reports, “clean sweep” emerges in 1884, when the Kansas City team in the Union Association won all the games against Boston “…thus making a clean sweep of the series.”
Later on, “clean sweep” got shortened to just a sweep, which Zimmer notes is useful for headlines which need to be pithy.
This week, we also discussed the phrase “one fell swoop.” To hear that discussion, listen to the audio above.
