Word.ws English Dictionary

Saturday night palsy

Saturday night palsy noun: paralysis due to radial nerve compression in the arm, resulting from direct pressure against a firm object.

Noun

Saturday night palsy (uncountable)

  1. (informal) Paralysis due to radial nerve compression in the arm, resulting from direct pressure against a firm object.

Origin of Saturday night palsy

Introduced mistakenly as a simplification of saturnine palsy, a complication of lead poisoning which has a similar presentation. Folk etymology associates it with carousing and intoxication on Saturday nights, which causes the individual to fall asleep in unnatural positions, such as on a chair or bed with one arm hanging over the edge.

Questions about Saturday night palsy

What does Saturday night palsy mean?
Saturday night palsy means paralysis due to radial nerve compression in the arm, resulting from direct pressure against a firm object.
What part of speech is Saturday night palsy?
Saturday night palsy is a noun.

Words near Saturday night palsy in the dictionary

  1. saturative
  2. saturator
  3. saturators
  4. Saturdaily
  5. Saturday
  6. Saturday night palsy
  7. Saturday night special
  8. Saturday night specials
  9. Saturday soup
  10. Saturday-morning cartoon
  11. Saturday-morning cartoons

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Saturday night palsy (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “Saturday night palsy.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/saturday_night_palsy. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.