COUCH POTATO

A couch potato spends a lot of time watching television and takes little exercise.

 Examples of use:

 “Tests on 3,500 adults over 50 found that verbal memory decline was twice as bad in couch potatoes, compared to lesser TV watchers, over six years.”

 “An app really can take you from couch potato to half-marathon runner in just eight weeks.”

 “But the whole point of Lent is it’s supposed to be a challenge, so stop being a couch potato and limit your time in front of the TV.”


This ingenious phrase originated in the US around 1976. A potato is a tuber (a vegetable that grows from a thick underground stem), and the slang term “boob tuber” was used at the time to refer to someone who was addicted to the “boob tube,” a slang term for television [1]. This somehow evolved into “couch potato.”

 [1] Cresswell, Julia. “couch potato” in The Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins. Oxford University Press, 2009. 

Photo credit: Jana Vanden Eynde