“Hit the Sack”
💭 Meaning
To “hit the sack” is to go to bed, usually to sleep, often after a long or tiring day.
✍️ Examples
After finishing three supplemental essays in one night, Henry's student was ready to hit the sack.
Henry told his students to hit the sack early before the big test instead of cramming until midnight.
Henry hit the sack right after sending the guidebook chapter to his editor, exhausted but happy.
📜 Origin
The phrase comes from the old practice of sleeping on a “sack," a mattress made from a cloth bag stuffed with straw, hay, or similar material. “Sack" was already slang for a bed in the 19th century, and “hit" carried the sense of heading for or flopping onto something, as in “hit the road" or “hit the hay." “Hit the sack" is generally traced to early 20th-century American slang, and it was widely used by the 1930s, helped along by soldiers and sailors who had every reason to talk about bedtime. The exact first use is hard to pin down, but the image of falling onto a straw-filled sack for the night is the clear root.
