paint the town red

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

to go out and celebrate exuberantly, typically by visiting bars, restaurants, and clubs in a state of high spirits and without restraint; the phrase dates to the late nineteenth century and is thought to derive from incidents of boisterous behaviour — literally splashing red paint around a town — associated with revelling cowboys or with a legendary prank by the Marquess of Waterford in 1837; the chromatic metaphor connects the redness of the act to associations of passion, vitality, and abandon, and the image of transforming the town through paint connects celebration to artistic creation; the idiom is used to describe any festive, liberatory night out that departs conspicuously from ordinary decorum