Straw that broke the camel's back

"The last straw" redirects here. For the Charles Bukowski film, see The Last Straw (film). For the Diary of a Wimpy Kid book, see Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Last Straw. For the Snow Patrol album, see Final Straw.

The idiom the straw that broke the camel's back is from an Arabic proverb about how a camel is loaded beyond its capacity to move or stand. This is a reference to any process by which cataclysmic failure (a broken back) is achieved by a seemingly inconsequential addition (a single straw). This also gives rise to the phrase "the last/final straw", used when something is deemed to be the last in a line of unacceptable occurrences. Variations of this idiom include "the straw that broke the donkey's back", "melon that broke the monkey's back" and "feather that broke the camel's back".

One of the earliest published usages of this phrase was in Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son where he says "As the last straw breaks the laden camel's back", meaning that there is a limit to everyone's endurance, or everyone has his breaking point. Dickens was writing in the nineteenth century and he may have received his inspiration from an earlier proverb, recorded by Thomas Fuller in his Gnomologia as 'Tis the last feather that breaks the horse's back.’

In other languages

In Swedish this phrase is translated as "det var droppen som fick bägaren att rinna över", in Dutch as "de druppel die de emmer doet overlopen", in Italian as "la goccia che fece traboccare il vaso", in Spanish as "la gota que colmó el vaso" and in French as "c'est la goutte d'eau qui fait déborder le vase", all of which roughly translate as "the drop that make the cup run over".