When do we paint the town red?

To paint the town red is to enjoy yourself flamboyantly, to go on a boisterous or exuberant spree. The exact origin of the phrase is uncertain, though there is a colorful (if probably apocryphal) story involving a British nobleman with too much time and paint on his hands.

The phrase is sometimes claimed to have its beginnings in a night of carousing in 1837, when the Marquis of Waterford (a young aristocrat with a well-established reputation for hell-raising) went on a rampage through the English town of Melton Mowbray, along with his equally unruly friends. Legend has it that they splattered red paint on a number of buildings throughout the town. It’s a charming story, but as with many charming stories about the origins of words or phrases, there is little evidence to actually support it.

For one thing paint the town red doesn’t appear in print for nearly five decades after the Marquis's alleged activities in Melton Mowbray. The earliest citations of the phrase that we have come in the early 1880s.

They charge me with the slaughter of 200 young girls, but it should be known that monarchs in this country are never looked up to if they don’t occasionally paint the town red.
— The Breckenridge Bulletin (Breckenridge, MO), 24 Nov. 1881

...he took supper at the hotel, seasoning his meal with divers infusions of whisky and other maters, so that in the evening he felt in proper shape to “paint the town red.”
— Cincinnati Enquirer, 27 May 1882

Pete Hintz, freight conductor on the I.B. and W. Railroad, filled up with bug-juice and proceeded to paint the town red.
— Cincinnati Enquirer, 17 June 1882


It is notable that many of the early uses of this phrase specifically meant "to get drunk." The meaning of the expression has broadened somewhat over the past century; we now use paint the town red to refer to any number of nonspecific forms of revelry (which may or may not include drinking). It is unclear why the color red was chosen rather than some other hue, although it seems possible that it was thought to be appropriately garish and attention-getting. We may never know the precise origins of this phrase, but we can rest assured that if the Marquis of Waterford did indeed paint a town red in 1837, he would likely be pleased to know that people are still talking about it today.