salad days
plural noun
William Shakespeare
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When is someone in their salad days?
A good salad is fresh, crisp, and usually green. Those attributes are often associated (in both vegetables and people) with vitality and immaturity. The first English writer known to use salad days to associate the fresh greenness of salad with the vigor and recklessness of youth was William Shakespeare. In Antony and Cleopatra, Cleopatra praises Marc Antony's valor and demands that her serving woman do the same. When the servant instead praises her former consort, Caesar, Cleopatra threatens her—until the woman notes that she is only echoing Cleopatra's own effusive past praise of Caesar. Cleopatra's reply marks the first English use of salad days:
"My salad days,
When I was green in judgment, cold in blood,
To say as I said then."
Examples of salad days in a Sentence
Mike Dojc, Forbes.com, 18 Sep. 2025
There was a time, in its salad days, when Coachella felt like the American answer to Glastonbury; an oasis for music nerds that was a far cry from city festivals like Lollapalooza; a chance to live out an American Western fantasy soundtracked by Mastodon and Jay Z.
—Arielle Gordon, Pitchfork, 16 Sep. 2025
But the salad days of spiders and mosquitoes may only last a short while, with adult dowitchers wrangling their months-old babies and guiding them to warmth via the Pacific Flyway, a north-south migration route stretching from Alaska to Patagonia in South America.
—Jake Goodrick, Sacbee.com, 4 Sep. 2025
Sitcoms and other comedy forms, of course, emerged since those midcentury salad days, but then, so did Saturday Night Live and MADtv and SCTV and Key & Peele and Inside Amy Schumer and In Living Color.
—Steven Zeitch, HollywoodReporter, 20 Aug. 2025
See All Example Sentences for salad days
Cite this Entry
“Salad days.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/salad%20days. Accessed 9 Nov. 2025.
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