get up on the wrong side of bed

Idioms

Be in a grouchy, irritable state, as in What's got into Max today? Did he get up on the wrong side of bed? This expression alludes to the ancient superstition that it was bad luck to put one's left foot down first, and was so used in a number of 17th-century plays. By the early 1800s it was associated more with ill humor than misfortune.

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023