Does “Piss Poor” Really Come From Selling Urine?

According to one of the internet’s favorite history stories, poor families once collected urine and sold it to tanneries. If you survived by doing that, the story goes, you were literally piss poor. It is memorable, gross, and just believable enough to spread.

There is one problem: the evidence does not support that origin.

The Myth

The viral version usually says families saved urine in pots, sold it to tanneries, and became known as “piss poor.” Sometimes the story continues by claiming the truly destitute could not even afford a pot to collect it in.

The Weird Part: Urine Really Was Valuable

Old urine contains ammonia, so it really did have practical value. Across different periods, urine was used in laundering, textile processing, leather work, and other chemical processes. The Romans even collected and taxed urine. So the history behind the viral explanation contains a very real ingredient.

But a true fact about urine does not automatically prove the origin of a phrase.

The Timeline Is the Problem

Surviving evidence for the expression “piss poor” appears much later than the supposed medieval or early-modern tannery story. The phrase is associated with 20th-century American slang and was in use around the World War II era. In those examples, piss works as a crude intensifier: something can be piss-easy, piss-weak, piss-awful, or piss-poor.

That makes the simplest explanation much less glamorous: “piss poor” probably developed as emphatic slang for something extremely bad or inadequate, with the poverty meaning growing naturally from that usage.

Why the Fake Story Feels So Convincing

This is a classic folk etymology. It combines several true historical details—urine had economic value, leather workers used strong chemical treatments, and poor households reused nearly everything—then connects those facts into an origin story without documentary evidence for the connection.

What About “Not a Pot to Piss In”?

That expression really does describe extreme poverty, and surviving documentation predates the evidence for “piss poor.” A version appears in a 1934 typescript of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood: the longer expression referred to someone having neither a pot nor even a window to throw its contents from.

What it does not prove is that the pot was needed to collect urine for sale. That extra tannery explanation appears to be a later story attached to an already vivid poverty expression.

Myth vs. History

Urine was collected and commercially useful: true.

Urine had uses in cleaning, textiles, and leather processing: true.

“Piss poor” came from poor families selling urine to tanneries: almost certainly false.